


It's A Matter of Holding On

by hayesgeneration



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Actual Wolf-Werewolves, Alive Laura Hale, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Magic!Stiles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-01
Updated: 2013-12-29
Packaged: 2018-01-03 05:07:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 32,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1066114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hayesgeneration/pseuds/hayesgeneration
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Derek’s scared. The anxiety is wedged firmly underneath his sternum, a quick thump of <i>thud thud thud</i> he can’t tamp down no matter how hard he tries. Cora is never late. She’s never late, it’s just fact; it’s fact, and while Derek is pretty sure that once in a while, people with normal, healthy relationships with their brothers and sisters are late or forget or, or, <i>whatever</i>, this is not one of those times.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Happy December 1st, friends! This is another collaboration-project by me and the ever-talented illustrator and plot-machine [Girleverafter](http://girleverafter.tumblr.com). We were originally going to make a proper Constantine AU and then it turned into… not a Constantine AU as such. There’s a bit inspiration here and there though.  
> Just like last year, we’ll be posting on Advent Sundays. Rated for future chapters; more tags will be added as we go along. Enjoy!

 

[ ](http://s4.photobucket.com/user/leechys/media/null_zps769f2270.jpg.html)

art by [Girleverafter](http://girleverafter.tumblr.com/)

 

It’s 9 pm, and the street outside Derek’s apartment building is dark, splotches of light from the lamp posts breaking sporadic tears in the shadows. There’s a vague sound of a periodically repeated laugh track from a television coming from a house across the street when Derek extends his senses, strains his hearing, hands white-knuckled on the sill of the window facing the road.

It’s 9 pm, and Cora is not picking up her phone, just like she wasn’t half past five, half an hour late, and something in Derek is _aching._

Derek believes in telepathy about as much as he believes in anything in relation to his family’s condition; it all just falls under the umbrella term “werewolf stuff”, which is to say he doesn’t honestly care a whole lot for wasting his time thinking about it; it just is. That said, the plain emotional connection between pack members was something Derek experienced as early as at the tender age of four, when his granddad died and the grief in the house was amplified, fed back and forth between especially the children, Derek in his mom’s lap, Laura curled up in a corner and snarling and—

And Derek’s scared. The anxiety is wedged firmly underneath his sternum, a quick thump of _thud thud thud_ he can’t tamp down no matter how hard he tries. Cora is never late. She’s never late, it’s just fact; it’s fact, and while Derek is pretty sure that once in a while, people with normal, healthy relationships with their brothers and sisters are late or forget or, or, _whatever,_ this is not one of those times.

Derek reaches back and snatches his phone off the table behind him, his eyes never straying from the street. Speed dial 1, Cora Hale. It clicks directly to her voice mail again, a short “hi, this is Cora, leave a message”, and Derek just breathes for a long moment after the beep. He feels raw, inside and out, and he can feel his pulse in his gums. He hangs up.

The Bad Feeling reminds Derek of being sixteen, of a sudden gut-punch of nausea in the middle of a trigonometry lesson, of getting extracted from class and being sat down with Laura in the principal’s office and told about a fire still raging on the outskirts of the woods. Leaving the office under loud protests, getting in Laura’s car and driving to Beacon Hills Elementary School, breaking every traffic law in the book, his big sister’s clawed hands on the steering wheel and his little sister, shaking like a leaf, leaping down the front steps with two teachers on her heels when Derek stumbled out the passenger door.

Derek fights back a body-wrecking shiver and very, very carefully puts the phone down on the windowsill next to him.

By now, he’s become unwillingly familiar with The Bad Feeling, and even if, sure, there’s a little premature dread involved sometimes, Derek knows a personal anxiety issue from whatever it is that’s causing his throat to seize up and his world to feel like it’s tipping over.

So really, it shouldn’t hit him as hard as it does when he gets the first text message from Laura in years around 1 am, no hello, just “ _have you seen Cora?_ ”

_\---_

Alan Deaton’s vet office isn’t due to open for another two hours when Derek raises his hand to knock on the door, but still it swings open before he manages to land the first tap. He hasn’t seen Deaton in ages, but the man doesn’t appear to have changed a bit. He holds the door open for Derek and gingerly locks it behind them before leading the way into the heart of the clinic, an operating room where a sleeping cat with a fresh-looking leg cast is breathing slowly on the sterilized table in the middle.

“Whiskers here just finished surgery,” Deaton offers, abruptly startling the silence in the room and Derek along with it, like he didn’t know the man could speak, Jesus.

“Broken leg, though I think he’ll make a good recovery. Have a seat while I get him back to his cage.” The vet indicates a chair by the glass cabinets with a tilt of his head, picks the cat up with the expertise of a man who handles anaesthetized animals every day, and disappears into the adjoining room where Derek can smell fur and dry food and healing. There’s also the Mountain Ash and what-nots in the walls, in the ceiling, under his feet, but Derek tries not to think about that, and sits down instead.

Deaton’s a powerful man; Derek knows that. His family had an old history of working with the Hale pack back in the day, before… well, before. Derek hadn’t seen him much around as a kid, to be honest; always out gallivanting or running or playing. He’d met Deaton a fair number of times, though, mostly for special occasions, weddings, Cora’s and a few younger cousins’ naming ceremonies. For some reason it had made sense to call him at 3 am when he’d been close to vibrating out of his own skin – the man had known Derek’s mom after all, and even though Derek’s still on the fence about his weird calm demeanour, he’d trust his mother’s sense of judgement to the end of the world. It’s not like his own is the best anyway.

“Would you like some tea?” Deaton asks as he re-enters the room, drying his hands with a paper napkin that goes into a bin next to the operating slab.

“No,” Derek responds quickly, and then adds “thank you,” as an afterthought. There’s always been something about the older man that demanded respect, something – considering the situation – Derek feels he should give him. Deaton nods, curls his hand around a white cup on a small, wheeled table in the corner, and turns to face Derek.

“Your sister is missing,” he says, not as much of a question as it could have been to soften the blow, and even though Derek was the one who told him, it still feels like it solidifies the reality of the statement. Derek just nods. Deaton makes a regretful, sorry sound.

“I’m sorry, Derek. It’s been a while since I last saw you, it’s unfortunate that we should see each other again under such circumstances.”

Derek lowers his head and nods, feeling exposed and scrutinized on the frail plastic chair.

“Have you spoken to Laura?” Deaton asks, and Derek grits his teeth, because there’s no way in hell the vet won’t know that Laura has her own pack outside Sacramento now, away from Derek but close enough to what used to be her home.

“She texted me last night,” Derek bites out instead of what he really wants to say. “She asked me if I’d seen Cora. I told her no. She said to leave it to her, pack business.”

Deaton lifts his mug to his mouth and then sets it down, and Derek powers on before the other man says something that’ll make Derek feel awful. Like “do you miss her?” or “aren’t there anyone else you can go to?”

“I need your help,” Derek says, too loud in the quiet room. “You know things, you can help. Laura doesn’t trust humans anymore and she only has so many pack members who can look, and you know—" Derek pushes a hand through his hair with an angry sound, "you know I can’t leave this alone, I can’t, and I don’t know what to do, so please,” he’s not beyond begging. Not for Cora. “Help me.”

Deaton smiles his mild, sorry smile, and dread instantly pools in Derek’s stomach.

“I’m sorry, Derek, I can’t. I’m neutral these days, I left the emissary business to my sister. For the time being, I’m really just a vet, sometimes a mediator. It’s better that way, keeps the balance.”

Derek is on his feet and in Deaton’s face before he makes a conscious decision to do so, the chair clattering onto the floor behind him.

“My _sister_ is missing, do you understand?” he snarls, even though Deaton doesn’t move a muscle. His mouth feels crowded, fear pushing from inside his gums, sharp around his tongue.

“Derek,” Deaton says, firmly, eerily calm, and it makes Derek panic more, makes him reach up and fist his hands in the other man’s shirt, lift until Deaton’s on his toes.

“Neutral is not good enough, not when my sister is missing, I asked you nicely _once_ and you will help me or I swear—“ A hand lands on his forearm, warm, resolute.

“Derek, look at me.” There’s no mighty power behind the voice, no booming echo under the ceiling, but it still makes Derek’s breath hitch, makes him bite his tongue and stare at Deaton until he tastes copper and manages to unlock his fingers; Deaton just lets him take his time, gets his feet back on the floor as Derek lets go. He takes a big, gulping breath, and grabbles for something to hold his weight, falling a couple of steps backwards before he can put his hands on the operating table, turns to lean on it while he breathes and breathes and breathes and his anger dissipates like greasy smoke.

“I’m sorry,” Derek grits out through a mouthful of receding fangs. “I don’t—“

“Derek, please,” Deaton interrupts, right next to him when Derek opens his eyes; he hadn’t even realised he’d closed them.

“You were never entirely big on words, for once live up to that and let me talk, alright?”

Derek nods furiously, keeps his hands clenched on the cold metal surface to check himself.

“Good. Now, I can’t help you, but I know someone who can. A former apprentice of mine, I knew his mom too.” It’s a sharp reminder, and it makes Derek cringe, but he nods again.

“He’s very good at what he does. I’ll give you the address and you can go see him for yourself, but that’s all I can do, do you understand?”

Derek feels like nodding is the only possible response he can give to anything Deaton says from then on.

 

\---

 

There’s one thought and one thought only in Derek’s head when he looks from the San Francisco address on the paper to the building in front of him and back, morbidly, flatly amused at the fact that he should, probably, be angry or panicked or something else entirely: Deaton has _got_ to be fucking kidding him.

 _Ye Olde Magic Shop_ is located between an apartment building and a dry cleaner’s, the sign above the door proudly displaying the name in squiggly white ink on dark wood. Derek doesn’t even know what he had expected. Maybe a home address instead of a shop – even a dark cellar somewhere would have impressed him more than… this.

There’s a chime above his head when he hesitantly pushes the door open and steps inside, and then he has to fight the impulse to windmill his arms the hell back out; the scent of incense and herbs hone in on him like a beacon, settling sticky in his nostrils, lavender, honey, something even sweeter, god knows how, something spicy like cinnamon, and Derek can’t help but gag.

Letting the door swing closed, he dares a look around. The shop looks like how he would assume your standard crystal-wielding-patchouli-burning-dream catcher-hanging person would like their hunting grounds to look like. It’s a little dark, with rich-brown oak shelving and a long, low table in the middle with an array of little glass bowls containing rocks of different stages of shine and colour arranged around a large piece of driftwood in the centre with crystals balanced on top. The walls are lined with odd figures and feathery dream catchers, colour on colour and pearls on strings and large, African masks—Derek balks when he makes sudden eye contact with a stuffed owl.

When Derek finally finishes his half-circle, and his eyes come to a rest on the small counter at the end of the shop, there’s a boy looking at him from behind it. Derek blinks.

“Can I help you?” the guy asks, looking bored and a little smug at the same time as he looks Derek up and down. Derek huffs his chest out in annoyance. He know how he looks, and it sure as shit isn’t like he spends his time polishing rocks and lighting incense, but that’s no excuse for being a rude little shit. Derek hates rude shop employees, like the teenage girl in the nearby convenience store who never smiles at anyone (not that Derek does, either, but at least he’s polite, damn it). It probably doesn’t help that the guy’s dressed like he should be sitting at a trendy coffee house – who the hell wears hoodies with dress shirts?

“Garnet for your girlfriend? You look like you’d date a Taurus – got some nice sandalwood soap in this morning too, for your momma, they’re good for small-ish Christmas presents,” the guy begins rattling off as he steps around the counter, instantly in business mode, even if Derek’s fairly sure that he’s actively being checked out, and it’s making him uncomfortable.

“Garn—what? No, I’m here for Stiles,” Derek tries; he feels wound tight, tired, he has absolutely no time for bullshit.

“Deaton sent me.”

The guy stops in his tracks towards Derek (good thing too, his fight or flight reflex was kicking in at the feeling of being cornered), mouth still slightly open. Then he smiles. Derek feels like he’s getting an x-ray.

“Alright. Someone steal your car? It’s been a while but I can do a quick location spell for you, see how it turns out, come on out back,” says – well, Stiles, apparently, and gestures with an oddly tattooed hand towards the space behind the counter. He keeps talking, words about things Derek doesn’t know anything about, and Derek kind of just follows; he’s going to have words with Deaton about wasting valuable time. _Words_.

Derek almost gets tangled in a beaded curtain that seems to separate the store from “out back”, whatever that means, but when they pass through a rounded doorway with no door, something happens.

Stiles stops mid-step, his word-stream breaking off abruptly, his whole body going from relaxed to tense in the span of a heartbeat; Derek _sees_ the shiver that rattles the kid’s broad, bony shoulders right before he turns, the crystal hanging from his right earlobe swinging heavily. All trace of good-natured joking gone from his face, he stares at Derek, like he’s surprised, like he’s concerned. One of Stiles’ hands twitches at his side in an aborted gesture, but Derek doesn’t miss it.

“What are you?”

Derek straightens his shoulders and ignores the way it makes Stiles seem to coil a little tighter, like a spring. There’s still a good four feet between them, and Derek prefers to keep it that way until he knows how this is going to go down.

“Werewolf. Deaton sent me,” Derek repeats. If this kid isn’t werewolf-friendly, that’s it, he’s screwed (so is Deaton. But, realistically, who’s Derek kidding, he’s in no position to threaten that man, no matter how much he wants to).

“Yo, Scott!” Stiles suddenly yells over his shoulders, eyes still firmly on Derek, and Derek starts on the spot and drops an inch further into a defensive crouch.

“Chill out, Cujo,” Stiles sneers, like _he’s_ irritated, and Derek scowls at him. There’s a set of feet coming down stairs further inside the back of the shop, and Derek doesn’t know what to expect, until another young man pops around a corner, a bag of chips in his hand. Derek immediately smells it; werewolf. So. This is either going to go wrong or really wrong. Great.

“One of yours, bro,” Stiles says, and Derek sees when the young man recognises that too; he takes a deep breath through his nose, and his eyebrows go up, but surprisingly not in alarm. “You know him?”

His friend rolls his eyes, and for some reason, Derek immediately feels himself forced more at ease.

“I’ve tried telling him that we don’t all know each other, but he won’t listen,” says the boy, almost apologetically, wiping his salty fingers on his jeans as he bumps his shoulder against Stiles’.

“This is Scott, my brother,” Stiles starts, and Derek’s eyes flit from one to the other in suspicion; he’s getting emotional whiplash here.

“You look nothing alike,” he says warily. It’s true; Stiles is pale and freckled while Scott is thick-haired and tan. Derek doesn’t trust liars, even if there wasn’t a hitch in Stiles’ heartbeat. Stiles looks unamused, Scott grins.

“Not by blood. Whatever, dude. We run the shop together, that’s what you need to know. You think he’s fine to let in?” Stiles directs the last part at Scott, who shrugs and stuffs another chip into his mouth.

“Probably. Plus, he’s already kind of in, just saying.”

“Sure,” Stiles murmurs as he turns, apparently done looking like he’s ready to spring whatever mo-jo he has on Derek at the drop of a hat, “if he tears us apart I’m blaming your shitty guard dog qualities.”

Scott snickers and tosses his head in direction of Stiles for Derek to follow. Scott looks solid and would probably be vicious in a fight, but he has an open face, which is most likely a big part of what keeps Derek from wanting to charge full-pelt down the street to get home. That, and why he’s there.

They sit down around a table in what looks to be a small kitchenette with a kettle, a microwave and sink. It’s cluttered, to put it mildly, and Derek steps over a trash bag resting by the kitchen table. There’s a truly ugly frame standing on a narrow shelf with a picture of Stiles, Scott and a dark-haired girl with a braid in front of the store; probably from opening day.

“We live upstairs,” Scott offers politely as he sits down next to Derek, Stiles on his other side. “This is sort of the only kitchen space we have right now, there was an, uh, accident with the proper one—“ he breaks off with a yelp when Stiles jabs him in the ribs with two fingers.

“Customer, Scott, sent by _Deaton,_ he does _not_ need to know that,” he hisses, and Scott smiles sheepishly at Derek. Derek doesn’t say anything. He’s counting the exits (there’s two, one if you count the fact that he doesn’t actually know what the narrow staircase leads to) and trying not to choke on the smells still cloying up his senses.

“So,” Stiles begins, and folds his arms in front of him on the table. “I’m taking it you’re not here because you lost your car, because you could do fine sniffing that out yourself, no pun intended.”

Derek nods as Scott stuffs away his snack bag and settles properly in his chair, face turned towards Derek.

“And if Deaton sent you for something that isn’t menial crap, it either means I’m in trouble, or you’re in trouble.”

Derek nods again, and steels himself for a slew of jokes or something mocking, but it never comes. Stiles just looks at him, all business, suddenly looking a lot older than Derek initially thought he had to be.

“My sister, Cora. She's missing,” Derek says. It hurts no less every time it comes out his mouth.

“How long?” Stiles asks, as Scott reaches across the table for a notepad balancing on the corner.

“Close to 24 hours,” Derek replies, clenching his hands in the table top. He’s getting a headache, fucking incense, which Scott seems to notice while taking notes.

“Breathe through your mouth, dude, you get used to it.” His smile is kind, and Derek nods tersely in thanks and starts breathing through his mouth; he can almost taste the patchouli, but it’s better than the smell.

“Where was she last seen?” Stiles asks, digging in through a linen bag he produced from underneath a pile of papers. Derek thinks for a moment. Cora must’ve spent the afternoon at home before going to Derek’s in the evening, standing date every other Thursday.

“Pollock Pines, east of Sacramento. She lives there.” Scott writes his information down, and Stiles stops rummaging for a moment to frown at Derek.

“Did you drive from Pollock Pines? Isn’t that like, two hours?”

Derek shakes his head.

“I’m from Beacon Hills. _She_ lives in Pollock Pines,” he replies, looking down at his hands.

“Hey, us too!” Scott exclaims delightedly to his left. Derek’s eyebrows go up.

“We thought business might be better in San Francisco,” Stiles explains with a shrug, and finally pulls something out of the bag; more incense. Derek bites back a groan.

“Alright, so the good news is, I’m pretty familiar with location spells. Looking for people is different than looking for say, a car, it takes more, but it should still work out just fine. Bad news, I can’t guarantee you it’ll work. Do you have something of hers with you?” Stiles asks, and reaches for a water bottle on the counter behind him. Derek pats quickly at his jacket pockets and pulls out a thin, folded up tank top he holds out for Stiles to take.

“Your sister’s top. Not weird or creepy at all,” he says, folding the shirt neatly on the table in front of him.

“Shut up, it was the only thing I had lying around,” Derek snaps, and Stiles holds his hands up.

“Just saying, man. Scott, would you—“

“On it,” Scott says, already getting up, grabbing the jar of bitter-smelling powder off the table and heading back into the shop.

“He’s just flipping the sign, Fridays aren’t busy at this time anyway,” Stiles explains. Scott returns moments later with a small tray made of what looks like cast iron, which he places in the middle of the table. Derek scoots back. He’s never been big on magic like this; he’s not sure what's about to happen, so he just watches as Scott scoops powdered incense into the small tray and uses his bare hands to pinch it into a tiny, dark blue mountain in the centre.

Meanwhile, Stiles is shrugging off his hoodie and unbuttoning the cuffs of his sleeves. As he rolls them up to his elbows, Derek’s eyes plaster to the dark ink on Stiles’ skin; his forearms are entirely black on top and white-blank underneath, like half cuffs with spikes pointing towards his elbows. The long strokes Derek noticed earlier on Stiles’ hands seem to be in line with where the tendons in his hands lie under the skin, curved at his knuckles and dotted along the sides. Derek doesn’t actually recognise the symbols from anywhere, but he does notice the white layered scar-tissue on the soft insides of Stiles’ pale forearms.

“Right, I think we’re good,” Stiles says, and claps his hands together, snapping Derek’s eyes up to his face.

“Should I do something?” Derek asks, probably a little late, but Scott just shakes his head as he sits back down next to him with a box of long matches.

“He’s good, you just watch.” There’s a special kind of glint in his eye that makes Derek uneasy and curious at the same time, and then Scott leans over the table, strikes a match, and lights the blue volcano of incense. It flickers and sparks as the powder ignites with a bright green flame, the fire dying down after a moment while Stiles is unscrewing the water bottle in his hands. With a tilt of his wrist, he pours out about what Derek could hold in his palm on the surface between him and the folded shirt.

Derek realises he’s holding his breath, and it isn’t because of the incense.

The solid black of Stiles lower arms is shifting. Correction; something _in_ the jet-black cuffs is shifting. The small kitchen seems darker, and Scott is stock-still beside him, and Derek can’t help but stare, because his eyes really have to be playing tricks on him.

The water is starting to collect in odd shapes under Stiles’ hands, and he’s not even touching it; dollops of drops merging and half-moons circling the smaller puddles. His face is as serious as it was when Derek stepped through his arch earlier.

When Stiles dips his index and middle finger in the water, something like a spiral lights up the black canvas of his right arm, a sudden pop of warm white that disappears just as quickly. The water patterns shift direction, forming shapes counter-clock wise in the dimmer and dimmer kitchen. Stiles seems terrifyingly still, not a tremor to his shoulders or a rise of his chest with breath; his focus is static in the air, pulling at the light from the lamps until he looks luminescent.

His eyes though, they’re what keep pulling Derek’s focus; even from his seat across from Stiles, pushed away from the table at a safe distance and frozen in his chair, the young man’s eyes are very clearly completely swallowed by a film of white. Through the curling smoke, Derek can still see them flicking minutely back and forth, like Stiles is reading the water, tracing his fingers across the surface of the table, the water following, up, up, until he touches the fabric an arm’s length away. Water soaks Cora’s shirt, and Derek has a delayed moment of panic about possibly ruining his sister’s things, when Stiles abruptly sits back up in his chair with a rattling heave, the fluorescent tubes under the kitchen cabinets lighting back up so suddenly that Derek cries out and slaps a hand over his eyes. Spots dance on the insides of his eyelids and in his vision when he opens them back up.

Scott is already in motion, scooping up the tray of incense and taking it to the sink where he turns the tap on. Stiles looks worryingly frustrated, drinking from the bottle he’d used for the spell like he’s been denied fluids for days.

“What?” Derek asks immediately, blinking rapidly to get rid of the disruption in his field of vision. Stiles takes a deep breath, sets the water bottle down, and wipes his wet fingers absent-mindedly on his shirt.

“I don’t know.” That was the last thing Derek wanted to hear.

“What do you mean you don’t know?” Scott asks as he comes up behind Stiles, dripping iron tray in his hand.

“I mean I don’t know!” Stiles says exasperatedly, throwing out a hand at the now still puddle of water and the damp shirt.

“I didn’t get a location, I didn’t even get a ‘sorry, out of range, try again later’, I lost her just outside of Sacramento, and then nothing, nada! I just got a feeling and a flash of emotion, and…” he trails off, looking back over his shoulder at Scott’s frowning face, and then back at Derek.

Derek thinks he’s going to be sick.

“And it wasn’t good.”

Derek has to stand. He’s feeling light-headed from the incense, from exhaustion, from not knowing what he’s doing. He’s not used to depending on other people this way, not anymore.

“You have to try again,” he demands, crossing his arms to stop himself from pacing. Stiles lets out a startled laugh that grates Derek’s ears.

“Listen, buddy, this isn’t exactly a picnic for me, okay—“

“You have. To try. Again.” Derek snarls, leaning over the table and slamming both hands down in front of Stiles, who pushes himself out of his seat and meets his gaze dead on, a retort obviously on the tip of his tongue.

“Hey!”

Derek’s eyes snap to Scott, who looks angry; not something Derek could have imagined on his face.

“The man said no. He can’t do this again so soon, it takes a hell of a lot out of him, so back off!” His eyes flash, golden and bright, and Derek wants to tear someone’s head off. Instead, he rips himself away from the table and stalks towards the shop entrance, hands shaking, throat burning.

“Where are you going?” Stiles calls after him, chair scraping back and footsteps pounding after Derek.

“I’m going to Sacramento,” Derek snaps, just as a hand closes around the ball of his shoulder.

“I’m coming with you.”

 _That_ makes Derek pause.

“You’re what?” he asks, turning, close enough to Stiles that he can tell their only slight difference in height by the inch.

“I’m coming with you,” Stiles repeats, prodding Derek hard in the sternum. “Something’s fucking with my magic and I want to know what it is.”

Derek stands still for a moment, schools his breathing. He used to be so angry, all the time; he’d gotten better. Stiles doesn’t seem to give a shit if Derek’s angry, just crosses his heavily tattooed arms and lifts his eyebrows like he’s daring Derek to say something.

“Fine.”  


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note the new rating and additional tags for this chapter.

[ ](<a%20href=)

art by [Girleverafter](http://girleverafter.tumblr.com/)

 

The first 30 minutes of the ride towards Sacramento is tense. From Derek’s crowded seat in the back of Stiles’ sky-blue jeep, it seems almost thick enough to cut with a bread knife, Scott and Stiles in the front seats quiet in a way that doesn’t seem natural for them.

“You haven’t introduced yourself yet,” Stiles says, the first time anyone has opened their mouth since they left San Francisco. Derek shifts in his seat.

“Derek Hale,” he responds quietly, eyes fixed on the scenery flying by outside. Stiles nods to himself and falls silent again.

The road is humming away under the tires of the car, a steady, low roar of damp asphalt meeting rubber. Derek keeps nodding off. He’s losing track of when he last slept and what time it is, late afternoon light filtering in through his dirty window.

Derek falls asleep when Stiles and Scott start talking amongst themselves in low voices, a half-conscious slumber permeated by the warm air in the car and the clipped bits and pieces of almost-dreams.

 

\---

 

They finally stop just south of Davis, a city outside Sacramento where Stiles claims he caught Cora’s last spiritual handprint – whatever the hell that means, Derek thinks – parking the jeep just off the side of a minor road away from the highway. Stiles folds himself out of the car like a long-limbed deer and immediately start scuffing the soles of his shoes firmly into the dirt in a way that seems too resolute to be something like a nervous habit. Derek watches him closely as he and Scott too step out of the car.

Stiles has his head tilted towards the wind, not sniffing it like Derek would, but like he’s listening for something. He scrapes his left foot in a half-arch out from his body, like a human metal detector, and the dust from the dirt rises around him just so much more than it would from wind and friction alone. Then he nods.

“This is it, this is where I saw her last.” There’s something grim in his eyes Derek recognizes from earlier, and it doesn’t make him feel any better.

“Scott,” Derek calls out, pulling his eyes away from Stiles now bending down to inspect the edge of asphalt on the side of the road. Scott comes up beside him, visibly sniffing the air around him.

“How good’s your sense of smell become?” Derek asks, bending down to pull his shoes off. Scott stops mid-sniff, faces Derek and, for a moment, looks surprised.

“Uh, pretty good, I guess. I was bitten in high school, so it’s not really new to me anymore. How did you know?”

Derek just shrugs. There’s something different about bitten werewolves he can’t really specify. He’d known from the moment he met Scott in the shop, sensed a different air about him in the way Scott hadn’t immediately bared his teeth to defend his territory. Scott is still very, very human. Derek can appreciate that, can see what kind of asset it might be to have someone like that in your pack, someone who hasn’t had to be hyper-vigilant since they were little, no life-long experience with pack laws and hiding from hunters and being raised with _mine, protect, foe._

He’s an omega in a whole other way than Derek is, because Scott used to be human. It doesn’t weigh on him like it does on Derek, not having a pack, because Scott looks to have done just fine having his human relations to fall back on after he was turned – Derek knows that Scott has no pack, because omegas aren’t difficult to spot, but Scott isn’t suffering under it; not like Derek is.

Derek rarely wishes he had been born someone else, that he’d been born human. He knows his life would have been different in a variety of ways if he hadn’t been a Hale though, that he still would have had his parents, his family. He tries not to think about that too often.

“We’re going to shift, and we’re going to track her scent,” Derek starts, shaking his jacket off.

“Stiles can stay here and rub crystals or braid his hair, we have a better chance of following the trail on foot,” he continues, folding the jacket and tossing it over the front of the car.

“I heard that!” Stiles calls behind them. Scott snickers.

Scott undresses and shifts first – “It’s cold as hell, dude, holy shit!” – and Derek notices Stiles pointedly turning around when he steps out of his own jeans and shifts at Scott’s side, hidden behind the jeep. His own coal-black coat looks heavy and worn next to Scott’s warm brown fur. Derek suddenly feels a lot older than he is. Scott stretches his forelegs and dips nearly onto his chest with a pleased sound, tail swinging heavily as he stands.

“Shit, Scott, you look like a lapdog next to that,” Stiles blurts, earning a hard head butt to the stomach from his friend. Derek whuffles heavily, would have loved to sigh. It’s getting dark quickly, and if they stick to the less lit up spaces between the highway and the smaller roads, they should be fine. Stiles’ location spell gave them a starting point, and spiritual handprint be damned, Derek is sure her scent can still be traced. Derek feels wired, like he could run ten miles, like he's on a chase. Stiles gets back in the jeep to follow them, complaining about having to stuff their clothes in the back first, and Derek and Scott set off southwest.

Going unseen along the road is easy. There are wide arrays of trees, and while Derek needs to stay in the shadows, Scott’s fur blends well with the sandy soil along the asphalt in the growing darkness, so they fan out to cover as much ground as possible, Scott closer to the road and Derek rushing between trees and underbrush. They don’t get far before Derek catches something on the wind. It leads them down a barely visible dirt trail through a thick bracket of pine trees, Derek pulling himself forward faster and faster until his legs are burning, his breath coming out in quick, panting huffs that cloud the air in front of him.

Cora’s Toyota has been parked in the divot created by a bank of dirt and the band of trees facing the highway. Her scent still lingers around the car, too faintly for comfort as Derek trots cautiously closer to the car and shifts back to two legs, cold air and trepidation pebbling the skin on his back and along his arms. The driver’s door is unlocked when Derek tries the handle. Scott is searching the immediate area around the car, the trees, the bank of dirt dumped after a building project. Derek is just pulling the car door open when he hears the jeep pull up and Stiles get out.

The Toyota smells like blood and wolfsbane. Derek steps away from the car, arms falling limply down by his sides. He can hear Scott talking to Stiles, the rustling of clothes being pulled out and handed over, but it’s muted in his ears, a dry detail in the back of his head to accompany the dryness in his throat.

“That smells like wolfsbane, dude,” Stiles tells Scott behind him.

“It is,” his friend confirms, voice giving away his nervousness. “Hunters?”

“Hunters.” Derek confirms with a snarl. The boys fall silent behind him. Derek can’t stop staring at the car. The faded herbal smell of poison stings his eyes and makes him want to sneeze, even from a distance.

“Derek?”

Derek turns. Stiles is standing a few feet from him, head turned away and the bundle of his clothes held out.

“Not that we don’t all enjoy having your bare ass on display, but you should probably put on some clothes.” Stiles' voice sounds like he feels awkward and is playing it off with humour, but it’s evident from his tone that he knows that finding Cora’s car isn’t at all a good sign. Derek takes his clothes without a word and puts them on, one article at a time, on automatic. His head feels empty, feels heavy. He’s not even sure what do to next.

“The trail continues south,” Scott offers when Derek’s dressed again, his back to the abandoned car.

“If we take Stiles’ car we can make faster work of following it. It’s easier now we have a scent besides her own,” he adds, wrinkling his nose like he still smells the weird wolfsbane variant from ten paces away. Derek doesn’t blame him; he does too. He nods mutely, breathing in harshly to get rid of the sting creeping up his sinuses.

“We have to leave her car,” Derek says, the words painful and scratchy on the way out.

“We should call a tow truck,” Stiles quickly suggests, “Before it gets stolen or something.”

Calling the tow truck and getting back in Stiles’ jeep is quick work. Derek snags Cora’s university sweatshirt from the backseat because it smells strongly of both her and the wolfsbane-and-herb concoction even Stiles has trouble recognising exactly, and something in him aches on a very basic big brother-level when they head back for the highway, and away from his sister’s cherished vehicle.

 

\---

 

Nearly two hours later, they’ve followed the scent all the way back to Beacon Hills. They ended on a few odd detours where both Scott and Derek had trouble picking up the scent again (Stiles had suggested that the hunters might be trying to throw Derek or another potential search party off. Derek agreed; hunters are assholes by nature), but by the time they were half an hour from Beacon Hills, Derek already knew where his sister’s trail was leading them.

They finally run out of what little scent trail is left not very far out of mid-town. There are Christmas lights popping up all over the city, and Derek finds himself looking out of the car window and not being able to stand it.

“But who the hell would have taken her outside Davis if they knew where she was heading? Why not just grab her when she got to Beacon Hills?” Scott asks in frustration when they’re heading back towards the magic shop in downtown San Francisco.

Derek couldn’t argue that they needed to make a plan before doing anything else.

“Because of Derek,” Stiles says. Derek looks up from the backseat. Stiles is eyeing him through the rear-view mirror, focused and intense despite the long day.

“Would you want to fight an angry older brother for the sister you’re trying to incapacitate on his territory?” he glances at Scott in the front passenger seat. “‘Cause I wouldn’t.”

The rest of the short drive is quiet aside from the radio Stiles turns on after a few minutes. It’s completely dark outside, way past normal dinnertime, but Derek isn’t even hungry, just exhausted and increasingly desperate. The lights from Chinatown are clearly visible when they get out of the car and trudge up the street. Scott unlocks the entrance to the dark shop with the “closed” sign still flipped, and locks it again after them while Stiles leads the way up the stairs Derek had seen earlier.

The apartment is a mix of chaos and order. The living room has two differently coloured couches arranged around a round table with books of varying ages stacked on top, jars of powders and things Derek can’t recognise in oil-looking fluid. A break in the shop-similar chaos is not only the Playstation by the television, but more noticeably the boxes of baby furniture standing neatly in the corner of the room by a door. Derek looks at the glossy pictures of cradles and changing tables on the boxes while Scott and Stiles move around him, turning on lights and turning on the radiators. Scott’s the first to notice his staring. His face immediately lights up in a 100 Watt smile.

“My girlfriend’s seven months pregnant. Awesome, right? We’re still clearing the baby room next to the kitchen – she’s visiting her mom in Atlanta before Christmas because she’s getting too big to fly soon,” he rattles off, picking up discarded clothes from the gray couch.

“That explains the mess,” Derek remarks dryly, not able to come up with anything to say in response to Scott’s obvious – and justified – joy. Scott just grins, all teeth, and heads for what’s probably his and his girlfriend’s bedroom, clothes in his arms.

When Derek scans the room, Stiles is visible through the open door at the other end of the living space, propping himself up at a desk with Cora’s sweatshirt spread out in front of him, a pair of tweezers in his hand. Derek steps in to look over his shoulder. Stiles’ room is sparse in furniture but with knickknacks everywhere, rocks and small pouches in rough fabric, a baseball poster on the wall, his desk cluttered with papers and glass vials and DVDs. He’s carefully digging the tweezers in between the threads of the sweatshirt fabric, like he’s trying to loosen the weaving, and then he holds it over a clean sheet of paper on the desk. Purple powder, just the slightest amount, drizzles onto the smooth, white surface.

“You probably shouldn’t stand so close to this,” Stiles murmurs without looking over his shoulder, and Derek pulls away fast, dimly aware that he had been so close they were almost touching.

“It’s wolfsbane alright, but I seriously can’t find out what it is about this sort that gives me a feeling,” Stiles continues irritably, putting down the tweezers and carefully scooping the powder into an airtight glass vial. Derek hums his agreement.

“It smells weird, not like it usually does.” Not that Derek is an expert on wolfsbane, but he’s had a few encounters, hell, he had a plant-crazed uncle when he was a kid who grew several sorts of rare wolfsbane for medical purposes. This one, though, there’s something not quite right about it.

“At least the powdered kind means she wasn’t like, shot or anything, right? So that’s good, you know, that means she has to be alive,” Stiles says, holding the vial up in front of the desk light to examine it.

Derek nods tiredly when Stiles glances back at him, and then drops down in a chair next to Stiles’ bed and rubs his palms over his face, stubble rasping loudly in the small room. Stiles swivels around in his chair, elbows on his knees and brows furrowed.

“I swear to god, dude, you’re about to keel over. Go home and get some sleep, we’ll meet here in the morning and keep looking.”

Derek stands up and crosses his arms. There’s no way in hell he’s going all the way back to Beacon Hills.

“I can work just fine. We’ll just be wasting our time,” he bites out, only half-guilty about Stiles’ heavy eyelids. Stiles’ eyes go skyward as he throws his hands up in the air.

“Fine! Sleep on the couch, get a hernia, see if I care,” he exclaims, then points an accusing finger at Derek. “But unless you get your grumpy ass out of my room so I can get some sleep, I’m not helping you tomorrow. Deal?”

Derek considers him for a moment, wondering if maybe, just maybe, Stiles would be the kind of friend Derek would be drawn to if he had the interest in making any, and nods.

“Deal.”

“ _Thank_ you,” Stiles says with a roll of eyes, and shoos Derek back into the living room. The gray couch seems to be a bit bigger than the green one, so Derek sits awkwardly on the edge of the cushions and tries to imagine a baby living in the weird space he’s currently invading. Despite being an odd mix of (presumably) Stiles’ old books, magic supplies and a whole selection of plants by the window Derek figures aren’t just your typical orchids and ferns, there are also spy novels and baby books on the shelves, floral throw pillows on the other couch, a corkboard with postcards and pictures on the back of the front door and warm white string lights fastened along the largest window between two shelving units. Why not throw a kid in there? 

The blanket Stiles throws at him hits in the face because he’s too busy trying to read the title of a thick book on a top shelf.

“Goodnight, Derek,” Stiles says, and disappears into his bedroom.

“ _Night_!” Derek hears filtering through the door to Scott’s bedroom, and Stiles yells back across the living room. Derek lies down on the couch with a firmly rooted anxiety in his chest, but it’s quickly overcome by how tired he is. He falls asleep with his nose pressed into the springy, tightly spun wool of the couch.

 

\---

 

They spend a good portion of the next day at the kitchen table downstairs, Scott on his laptop with Stiles and Derek leafing through books. Derek turns the pages with barely contained resentment, not sure what he’s supposed to be looking for. The book is about old hunter traditions, part hand writing and part print, one thing as absurd as the other. Some of it is about werewolves, about hunting rituals from as far back as the 1700’s, and some of it doesn’t even concern Derek and his kind at all. Stiles is hunched over a heavy plant encyclopaedia, his sample from Cora’s shirt undergoing a level of scrutinizing like nothing Derek has ever seen. He’d been wringing more wolfsbane out of the fabric earlier and poured the fine flakes into different fluid solutions that made the whole kitchen smell like cinnamon and burned hair and melted plastics. Derek and Scott had ended up having to go outside while Stiles frantically aired out the whole shop and lit mild incenses instead, noses burning and eyes red-rimmed from the onslaught of the stenches.

And still, Stiles has nothing on how the wolfsbane is different, or _why_ it’s different. That worries Derek the most. Blind-siding a werewolf and shooting it full of wolfsbane is one thing, but incapacitating and drugging it is a whole other can of worms.

“No magic today?” Derek asks, bookmarking the passage in the book about winter solstice rituals with a finger and looking up at Stiles hopefully. Stiles sighs deeply and leans back in his chair.

“Sorry to disappoint you, buddy, but researching herbs is sadly a lot about reading and trying out test samples. I should have become a chemist, I bet it would pay better too.” Sitting back up, the chair groans under him. Stiles indicates the book Scott’s submerged in.

 “Scott’s looking through old pack treaties and the info we’ve compiled on local hunter families over the years for motive,” then he points to Derek. “And you, compadre, are in charge of the lore. Growing up a werewolf probably means you’ve heard stories or encountered some kind of, I don’t know, ancient still-existing rituals you might recognise amongst all the folk-tale bullshit where we can’t.” Derek raises an eyebrow, honestly impressed.

“Do you do this a lot, detective?”

Derek could swear on his, admittedly, less than good name that Stiles flushes just slightly under the palm he’s propping his head up on. Stiles drops his head and his hands, a suddenly self-conscious, embarrassed smile on his face.

“My dad’s a cop. I couldn’t stay out of his business when I was younger. This,” he flaps a hand at the cluttered table, “this is just me finally having my own things to look into.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t think your dad would complain about that,” Scott comments from behind his book. Stiles reaches out and punches his shoulder. Derek has about two seconds to register Stiles’ second vial of wolfsbane toppling over between the boys, and then there’s powder everywhere – including in Scott’s face.

Derek shoots away from the table, hands clamped over his nose, and Scott roars in surprise and jack-knives back off his chair with a loud thump, spluttering, something that sounds like “mother _fucker—_ “ getting lost in the rumble that follows as he stumbles towards the kitchen sink.

And Stiles? Stiles laughs like someone just slipped on a banana peel, and Derek really can’t remember the last time he saw anything that purely ecstatic. He tries to tamp his own weird urge to laugh down and keeps his hands in place to protect himself while Stiles rushes to open up the kitchen windows – again – and scoops up the spilled herbs while Scott groans pitifully from the sink, his whole face tucked under the faucet. Derek has a feeling this isn’t the first time Scott has gotten his nose in Stiles’ herbs.

“You clear?” Stiles asks Derek when his throaty giggling subsides, wiping at his eyes. Derek takes a cautionary sniff and then nods. Stiles had filtered the wolfsbane so many times that by now, it’s thinned out and less of a threat, and the particles in the air seem to have been contained fast enough. There’s still a tangy scent left – the ingredient they can’t distinguish – but Derek figures he’s safe. Less can be said for Scott when his face finally emerges from the stream of water, his nose bright red and his eyes even more so than earlier.

“I hate you,” he croaks at Stiles, who pats him remorsefully on the back and hands him a dish towel to dry his face. Scott wipes his eyes and throws the rag straight into the trashcan.

“Also, I know what’s in the wolfsbane.”

Derek and Stiles balk halfway back into their respective chairs.

“You what?” Stiles asks, outraged, snatching the vial from the table. Scott pulls himself out of reach immediately, a safe distance away from his friend’s wild gestures.

“It’s ginger. Ginger and—“

“And Houndstongue!” Stiles exclaims, turning on the spot and grabbling for his encyclopaedia, flipping haphazardly through the pages until he slams a finger down on a green plant with small purple and red flowers. His eyes skim the pages quickly as Derek comes around the table to read with him, getting two words in before Stiles slams the book closed and moves again, in a flurry of limbs, to get at the unfiltered vial of wolfsbane standing on a counter.

“The smell threw me off because it’s a mix – _two_ other ingredients!” he says, victory evident in his voice, holding both vials up side by side.

“Why ginger and… Houndstongue?” Derek asks, trying to keep up with the sudden change of pace.

“Well, you’d assume that with something supposed to knock out a werewolf, you’d want something strong, right? So the ginger is often used to ensure success in magical operations, which goes well with the wolfsbane if you’re not completely familiar with working the powdered kind,” Stiles explains, setting the samples down and ticking off on his fingers, “and the Houndstongue is poison, which weakens the system like any other poison would, and is known from old times where you’d put a leaf of it in your shoe to prevent dogs from barking at you, sort of tying their tongues— _wow_ , that’s kind of offensive,” he adds, as if to himself, and then continues.

“The Houndstongue has a really nasty smell, right, and with ginger you have a really strong smell, and chemically separating them is a total hassle when you don’t know what you’re looking for, so they’re super hard to identify when mixed, but honestly?” he looks sceptical for a moment, “this isn’t the best concoction I’ve ever seen. Houndstongue and its effect on werewolves is still kind of a myth, like, if your wolf is already unconscious, you wouldn’t actually need to tie its tongue or poison it further or whatever. Something like mistletoe would be much more effective.”

Derek tries not to feel weird about Stiles’ extensive knowledge on how to poison werewolves. Stiles goes on, pacing the floor, throwing out his hands as he speaks.

“So we’re dealing with, well, a dealer, someone who isn’t exactly a chemical genius, someone who’d sell to hunters – because trust me, man, hunters do _not_ know their herbs, I know this from experience – which means that we’re talking fringe-dealers, which means—“ he stops, snaps his fingers, and turns towards Scott. Derek whips his head back and forth between the dawning realisations blossoming on both faces.

“Jimmy the Cricket,” Scott and Stiles say in unison. Derek should find that a little creepy. He doesn’t. He latches onto more important points of the conversation.

“Jimmy the _Cricket_?” he asks, brows furrowing, because that sounds like the biggest load of bullshit he’s heard since he met these two. Stiles crows in triumph and digs for a thick file under a stack of print-outs.

“Sleazy asshole who deals bad things, not what you’d call a model citizen,” he says, flipping through what looks to be records.

“Kind of dumb, really, built his whole clientele on shifty types like the guys who bought this rookie mix from him. I’ve had a couple of people in over the years looking for wolfsbane variants and other poisons. Obviously they didn’t come back after their first shot, so they usually go to the Cricket instead.” The “didn’t come back” hangs in the air for a moment, and Derek’s itching to ask what Stiles did to send them scurrying, but he holds himself back; they have more pressing matters at hand.

“I don’t think we’ve seen him for a while, he’s good at not being found, but if we can get to him, we might be able to wring out of him who bought this – I’m going to need coffee,” Stiles calls out as he heads for a filing cabinet just inside the store. Scott lets out a long-suffering sigh and looks at Derek like Derek’s supposed to understand how hard it is to live with this manic, magical tornado. Derek’s getting a good idea really quickly, if he’s honest.

“You sure you need coffee?” Scott asks, and Stiles makes a scandalized sound.

“If we need this done before New Year’s, yes!”

Derek finds himself sinking heavily into his chair as the boys work their way into records of Jimmy’s latest sightings, watching as they read, look up at each other, and find points of connection without a word spoken. Derek’s in awe, maybe even a little jealous; they’re symbiotic in a way he hasn’t been with anyone since he was at the playing-age as a kid.

“You got any food?” he eventually asks, hunger finally making itself present for the first time in days. Maybe it’s the progress. He can feel things happening now, and even if he still feels Cora’s absence as a frighteningly plausible permanent thing, they’re making leaps forward now. Scott absentmindedly waves towards the cupboards and the mini fridge.

“Take whatever you want.”

The small space, though, is pretty much void of food, and judging from the take-out containers Stiles had the sense to take out earlier, Scott’s girlfriend being away has meant crap food for quite a few days. Derek goes through a few drawers and frowns disapprovingly at the unused utensils.

“Why the fuck would you have a crème brûlée blowtorch?” Derek asks, holding the object in question up in astonishment. “You don’t even have a kitchen!”

“We do too!” Stiles defends, looking briefly up from his papers to glare at Derek.

“It’s a meth lab!”

“It is a _kitchenette,_ you philistine, take that back!” Stiles retorts accusingly.

Derek leaves to get take-away instead.

\---

 

By the time Derek makes it back to the shop with three meat lovers pizzas, Scott and Stiles are making notes on post-its and using the kitchen cupboards as a crime-board to tape over-head images of over-grown parking lots and empty buildings on. Stiles lets him in through the shop door and takes the food from him.

“Pizza? No noodles?” he asks, looking at Derek in dismay. Derek gives him his best _son, don’t_ -look and retreats to the kitchen.

“You didn’t tell me what you wanted.”

“We live literally just outside Chinatown, and you didn’t get noodles,” Stiles goes on in disbelief, clearing a space on an empty chair for the boxes.

“Don’t get him started on the noodles,” Scott tells him when Derek sits back down at the table, which is looking more and more cluttered. Stiles sticks a final post-it next to a grainy security camera photo of four hooded men in an alley way, and plops down to pull a pizza box to him.

“We haven’t had to actually find Jimmy for a while, but I knew keeping track of his whereabouts would come in handy some day,” he says, flipping the lid and taking a pleased whiff of his food before digging in. Scott makes himself comfortable on top of the counter and starts eating as well.

“Now, being of less than average intelligence, he circulates his usual hide-outs in a way he probably thinks is random, but it’s actually pretty doable figuring out in which order. It’s all in the math.” Scott indicates a note on one of several abandoned subway stations located throughout Beacon Hills while Stiles talks with his mouth full.

“The town always had this history of predisposition for attracting things that go bump in the night, so Jimmy made it his thing to stick around. We’re pretty sure he’s at one of the two subway stations in the industrial area up north.” Derek knows the subway stations. He’d spent a fair amount of time squatting in one back when he’d turned 18 and left Laura and her growing pack of omegas and old family friends craving a change of scenery, before he got his portion of the insurance deposit settled and found the loft.

Derek sets his half-empty pizza down hard.

“Let’s go then. I’m not wasting any more time sitting around on my hands.”

 

\---

 

It’s almost 9 pm by the time they get to the second subway station on the maybe-list after finding the first one completely void of life. Stiles had packed a small supply of herbs, a pocket-flashlight and a short, sharp knife into the pockets of his jeans and jacket before leaving, shoulders hunched against the chill outside.

According to the blue prints Stiles had whipped out, the subway station on the northeast end of the industrial area is one of the larger ones, architecturally divided up into three parts; the entrance section, the actual station platform, and a larger space further in for storage and upkeep.

“My money is on the storage section in the back,” Stiles says when they’re parking the jeep in an alley not far from the main entrance.

“Jimmy likes dark corners and spaces under rocks, somebody should probably have called him Jimmy the Cockroach instead, but that’s a detail I’m willing to overlook – anyway!” Stiles slams the driver’s side door.

“First off, I’ll do the talking. Jimmy’s never met Scott, which is probably a good thing, and both him and you kinda,” he gestures vaguely up and down Derek as they start walking, “you know, look like you could kick some ass, which is good for our scary-factor.”

Derek snorts but finds himself at the front when they get around the building and find a fire exit not far from the main entrance. Breaking off the lock is easy enough, and they descend down into the darkness. The whole place smells like stale water and sawdust. Stiles pulls out the flashlight but stays behind Derek, a werewolf on each side of him listening for movement. They make it through the entrance hall without encountering anything but a couple of rats skittering along the walls, and Derek figures that the platform would be a too open space to be in, too vulnerable for a dealer.

Behind the door marked “authorized personnel only”, Derek hears heartbeats. He stops abruptly and thrusts out an arm, catching Stiles in the chest. Instead of complaining about getting the wind knocked out of him, Stiles quickly lowers the flashlight.

“How many?” he whispers, just audible enough for Derek’s werewolf hearing to pick it up.

“I got eight,” Scott says, close to Stiles’ shoulder.

“Nine,” Derek corrects him. “How are we going to do this?”

Stiles seems to think that through for a moment.

“Sneaking in will get us shot, guys like these are jumpy little fuckers. I say we make an entrance.” And then he steps forward and pushes the door open.

The slight chatter that had been going on in the dimly lit room stops immediately. Derek’s eyes are busy cataloguing his surroundings; lots of space, a metal staircase leading to a fire exit, a disassembled train car off to the side, a mess of building equipment, crates and sleek steel materials.

And nine people, all stopped mid-movement with their focus now entirely on their intruders.

“Stiles,” a short-stacked, thin-haired man says as he comes around a table in the centre of the room. Stiles’ name in his mouth sounds like an accusation or a sour taste on his tongue. He seems jittery, sweating at the temples.

“Jiminy Jimmy Cricket, how are you?” Stiles asks with a huge smile that looks faker than the Rolex on Jimmy’s pudgy left wrist. The people around Jimmy are barely moving; Derek can smell their anxiety, sour in the damp air under the high ceiling.

“He brought wolves,” a man next to Jimmy says in a low voice, and Jimmy immediately looks outraged.

“What the hell do you want?” he snaps, but Derek doesn’t miss the way he wipes his palms on his jacket. Scott glances past Stiles at Derek. Derek shrugs. If playing an intimidation tactic will get him what he needs, he’s not above looking like a big, silent goon. There’s a small noise of alarm from someone in the back of the room when they both shift into their beta forms, eyes burning gold and blue on each side of Stiles, who smiles just a little wider and less fake. Then his face turns serious.

 “We don’t want trouble, Jimbo, we’re just here for some names.”

Jimmy narrows his eyes at Stiles.

“Why would I give you names?” he begins, but Stiles cuts right over him.

“You sold someone a shitload of wolfsbane with ginger and Houndstongue in the blend – amateur shit, I might add, sorry, Jimmy – and if you can just give us a name we’ll be out of your hair faster than you can start re-evaluating your choice in hideouts,” he finishes, just as Jimmy turns pale. Derek barely has to listen closely to notice the uptick in his heartbeat.

“He knows something,” Derek says, hopes Stiles catches the warning in his low voice, because the moment someone like Jimmy realises he’s in over his head on more than one account, that’s when things go to shit.

And, because of the cosmic rules of karma, which Derek has always believed in as much as he believes in anything spiritual up until meeting Stiles, that is the exact moment when it _does_ go to shit.

It’s one of Jimmy’s people who takes the first shot, amped up and anxious, his pupils blown huge. The whole place reeks of magic and putrid plumbing when Derek throws himself onto the concrete floor, narrowly dodging the bullet as Scott plows into the man and knocks him off his feet.

Hell breaks loose around them all at once.

Derek can sense Stiles somewhere off to his left, dropped into a boxer’s stance with his palms held up. He smells the crackling heat building in Stiles’ hands, before it’s released in a forceful expulsion that misses his tall opponent and creates a deep dent in the wall behind him. Scott is being herded backwards by the man he knocked over with a gun that smells like wolfsbane, and that's about as far as Derek manages to locate his companions, before he has to side-step a bullet himself.

Stiles is yelling at his opponent, taunts like he thinks he’s fucking immortal. Derek is really starting to worry about the guy’s sense of self-preservation. That is, until he realises that it’s because Stiles is egging the man on to come towards him, just in time for Scott to swipe his claws across the thick plastic restraints holding together a badly stacked pile of steel girders next to them from the other side. The pile topples, starts spilling, and then Derek can’t see the man anymore.

On his end of things, the two men advancing on him seem to have remembered what powers they have at their disposal. The tallest of them, the man who had recognised Derek and Scott, starts chanting, his eyes alight as the man by his side takes aim at Derek again. From the top of the raised metal platform, Jimmy is screaming at his men, his doughy face blotchy with anger.

“Kill them, for fuck’s sake, kill them!” he hollers, fingers white on the frail railing. Derek snarls at him, relishes briefly in the flinch it earns him, but loses focus long enough for a bullet – normal, no wolfsbane, thank _god_ – to take him in the side. Pain flares up along his ribs, white-hot, and Derek pushes himself forward and onto the man with the gun, pinning him to the ground. The guy's partner snaps out of whatever spell he was building, sloppy and panicked, and makes a run for the metal stairs when Derek sinks his teeth into the throat of the man underneath him. The dealer’s high-pitched scream turns into a disgusting gurgle when Derek digs his teeth in around his windpipe and yanks his head back, nose and mouth filling with blood as the screaming abruptly stops. Derek’s head is reeling as he spits out chunks of muscle, too high-wired to feel disgusted, fight or flight reflex firmly set on fight with whatever means necessary.

That’s when he smells different blood. It shouldn’t be possible, what with his nose clogged with one kind already, but when he whips his head around, he sees that it’s Stiles. Derek stares, paused mid-slaughter at the worst possible time.

Stiles is dropping the small, curved knife he’d brought onto the floor with a dull clatter, his left arm hanging by his side like he’s protecting it. The man in front of him is limping visibly, his knee sharply out of joint, but his hands are raised in defence rather than offense, like he’s unsure whether to run or not. That stumps Derek; the man is much larger than Stiles, if frayed and worn-looking at the edges. Stiles drags the fingers of his right hand through the blood running down his other arm, dripping from his fingers onto the floor. He smears the blood onto the black cuff of ink on his forearm, spins an intricate circle and then he _twists_ , like turning a rusty knob _._ The man in front of him drops like a ragdoll with a scream of agony. Stiles’ nimble fingers paint patterns of crimson, blurred, quick movements like he’s drawing at random, but Derek knows that there’s nothing random about the symbols melting into the dark canvas of his arm when the man twists on the floor, body clearly no longer under his own control, his head snapping back with an ugly, final crunch.

Somewhere behind him, Scott roars, and Derek turns towards the sound on instinct. The bullet is still lodged in his side, making healing difficult, and he’s losing blood faster than he can keep up, which might explain why he doesn’t register someone gaining on him before they’re slamming into him from the side. Derek crashes onto his back, the assailant on top of him pressing an iron bar against his throat with his entire weight. The metal feels acrid and burns against Derek’s skin, ripping a raw sound from somewhere deep in his chest. Derek struggles for breath, his limbs growing heavier as the poison seeps into his skin and the man above him yells for back-up. His head is pounding, vision blackening at the edges when suddenly, the sound of something hard making forceful contact with crunching bone makes the man slump forward over him. The pressure on his throat lessens, and Derek pushes the limp body off of himself with a pained grunt.

Stiles is standing over him, a rusty spanner in his hands. Panting, he pulls Derek to his feet, both of his hands covered in blood and dirt, his face pale and clammy. Derek recognises blood loss when he sees it, even as Stiles presses a palm over the deep cut on his forearm to stop it.

“Jimmy and his second bolted, Scott’s gone after them,” Stiles heaves, tipping forward just in time for Derek to catch him.

“I’m fine,” Stiles snarls, pulling himself away from the hands on his shoulders, turning to press his back to Derek’s. Derek knows the feeling; he’s _just fine_ too, if anyone were to ask him.

The remaining two of Jimmy’s subordinates are circling them, less worse for wear than Derek would like. The tall, dark-eyed woman in front of Stiles is sporting a shotgun, and Derek desperately hopes they’re out of wolfsbane bullets. He’s having a hard time keeping upright, and Stiles feels heavy against his back. He can feel Stiles’ rabbit-quick heartbeat against his shoulder blades, and he isn’t sure if the perspiration pressed between them is his, Stiles’, or belongs to them both. Still, Stiles has his hands up, even as they shake in the periphery of Derek’s vision.

“No more fire power?” Derek asks, flexing his fingers.

“The whole fireball thing is sort of a shy, one-trick pony, I can’t get it running again this soon,” Stiles replies ruefully.

The man in front of Derek raises his gun.

“Give me a boost,” Derek hisses out of the corner of his mouth.

“A boost?” Stiles whispers back.

“You can do that, I read through your books all day, give me a god damn energy boost.” The two people cornering them are awaiting movement, action, tense and stinking of fear.

“An _energy_ boost, are you fucking _crazy_?” Stiles hisses frantically.

“I’m not healing fast enough. Unless you want to die within the next few minutes—“ Derek starts, but Stiles cuts him off.

“I don’t know you!” he blurts, the back of his head knocking into Derek’s. The woman tenses, her finger on the trigger. Derek feels like he’s mere seconds away from his demise. He eyes the empty train car just a few feet from them, weighs the pros and cons of gambling for once in a long time.

“Am I just supposed to hand you like a—a furious badger and hope you don’t fuck me over and shove it down my pants?” Stiles exclaims, and that’s apparently enough movement to make the woman take her first shot.

“ _Yes!”_ Derek cries, yanking Stiles bodily out of the way of the bullet, gaining enough momentum to send them falling out of the line of fire behind the train car as the man empties his clip in their direction. Pain flares up Derek’s side and throat, blood pounding at his temples as he manhandles Stiles out from under him, both of them stumbling to their feet.

“FINE!” Stiles yells back furiously, and then his hands are on Derek.

It’s like having liquid sunshine poured down his throat – a lot less nice than it sounds. All Derek’s nerves seem to light up in a crackling symphony of wild-hot energy, Stiles’ hands on the sides of his head like brands of light.

The next few seconds are a completely and utter blur.

Derek flashes from movement to movement, like strobe lights, his body nothing more than a force to carry his claws and the ramming of his shoulders forward. His teeth find the spine at the base of the woman’s skull, and the man goes sprawling with a broken neck, bodies falling heavily within blinking seconds, and yet everything keeps spinning and spinning, an invisible tether yanking his body towards the floor, knees crunching against concrete, until suddenly, there are hands at his temples again, reeling him in, pulling him down, until Derek finds himself staring into the high, mouldy ceiling of the subway station, heart pounding wildly, blood singing with equal parts energy and strained exhaustion. Somewhere right beside him, Stiles drops onto the floor with a heavy wheeze.

“Jesus fucking _Christ_ ,” Derek hears, and then he can’t help but giggle. He _giggles_. He vaguely registers the disturbed look Stiles is giving him, but Derek can’t help it. It’s like something living is squirming in his chest, a giddy, hysteric feeling wanting out, and when he tries to shut his mouth, he almost chokes. Derek laughs, almost painfully, until he feels dizzy with it, has to roll over onto his side and cough forcefully for a long time, his body ridding himself of the drug-like vigour Stiles had pushed down his throat. Derek can’t recall the last time he laughed that long.

“What the hell are you doing?” Scott’s worried face leans into his field of vision, upside-down, face spotted with drying blood, hair sticking out everywhere. There’s a gash in his forehead closing as Derek watches.

“Derek here is having a moment, just let him,” Stiles replies hoarsely. Derek rolls onto his back and slowly pushes himself up until he’s leaning against the side of the train car. He must have broken a rib or two throwing himself and Stiles out of the way, but they’re already healing. With the burst of energy subsiding though, he can feel the pain in his side throbbing. Derek grits his teeth and digs two fingers into the open wound to pinch around the bullet. He hisses with pain as it comes out, but then there’s immediate relief as the wound starts closing. He lets out a long sigh and lets his head fall back and his eyes fall closed. When he cracks one of them open, he can see Stiles murmuring softly as he strokes a finger along the gash in his arm. A pale red, crackling burn trails after it, and soon the cut is smooth, white scar tissue.

For a while, they just sit there, Scott and Derek against the train car, Stiles starfished on the cold floor. The acid burn on Derek’s throat stops stinging, and the pain in his side is turning into just a mild ache. When Derek stands, Stiles slowly picks himself up, he and Scott leaning into each other for support as they get to their feet.

“What do we do now?” Derek asks, tongue still thick in his mouth.

“We Bonnie and Clyde it the fuck out of here before the police arrives, that's what,” Stiles mutters, testing the leg he fell on with a grimace.

“I scared the shit out of Jimmy. They gave me names, but not anyone I recognise,” Scott says, pulling one of Stiles’ arms over his shoulder. Derek nods though. It’s a start. 

“So, I’m all for Chinese take-out and a bed, what do you say?” Stiles offers, right before he passes out. Scott groans, clearly still not entirely healed, so Derek reaches out, picks Stiles’ boneless body out of his arms, and slings him unceremoniously over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. Scott starts towards a fire exit.

“Let’s get noodle-boy here back before he wakes up and makes good of that suggestion – he has this favourite place and they’re terrible.” 

 


	3. Chapter 3

[ ](http://s4.photobucket.com/user/leechys/media/null_zps8fa5cdf4.jpg.html)

art by [Girleverafter](http://girleverafter.tumblr.com/)

 

The neighbours in the next building are playing Wham’s Last Christmas for the third time in 45 minutes, when Derek comes back from doing the last of a seemingly endless number of patrols around the block. It’s close to midnight but the town is still alive and lit up, Christmas lights on buildings and dangling from the cable car that had gone past Derek sometime around his third round.

Letting himself in through the shop with Stiles’ keys feels weird. Derek himself has four keys in his jacket pocket; one for his front door, one for his ridiculously expensive car that he feels bad for driving (but which Cora loves), one for the garage where he stores said car. The fourth key is for a scuffed metal lockbox he keeps hidden in the small space under the silly spiral staircase in the loft.

That’s Derek’s though, the apartment, the car, the box, but letting himself into someone else’s shop, someone else’s home, that’s different. He hasn’t had a steady relationship where someone would lend him a key any time during his adult life. He doesn’t have his own copy to let himself into family members’ homes. Having the loaded keychain pushed into his hands, before Scott went to get the comforter off Stiles’ bed to cover the alternately groaning and snoring bundle of limbs on the couch, had felt unfamiliar and trusting. Even more so when he’d told Derek to “just to remember to lock the door when you come back” instead of questioning his need to patrol the area in case they were followed home. Then he’d checked Stiles’ airways, pulled off his friend’s shoes, and gone to bed.

Derek fingers a warm-red gemstone encased in tightly spun strings of metal in the shape of a tree, while he tries to remember which key is for the shop door. He finds himself flashing back to the fire in Stiles’ palms, the heat radiating from his back, the crackling trail of ruby-red sparks that had closed up his bleeding arm. Allowing himself a moment of reflection, Derek thinks it funny how the things you keep with your keys tend to reflect who you are. Stiles has several house keys, the keys to his jeep, the red stone, a black plastic keychain Derek belatedly recognises as the Batman logo missing one wing. It’s cluttered and there are probably a fair number of them that no longer have locks, but it all seem to fit, from what little Derek has gathered about the kid already; warm red, kind of a mess, geeky, lots of other people’s doors open to him.

Derek has four keys and no funny little superhero logo on a chain, because he has a lonely apartment and a lonely life, his fire stubbed out years ago after raging in him longer than it should have.

His bright spot comes by every other Thursday in a shiny Toyota, but even if they do get her back, Derek has a sinking feeling that “every other Thursday” is going to turn into once a month, then holidays, and then only if he begs, because Derek is a danger to people, and Cora got snatched on her way to Beacon Hills to see her asshole older brother behind her alpha’s back. Sneaking around is a breach of trust as it is – Cora loves their older sister, even if she tries not to talk about anything that contains the words “pack” or “Laura”, implicit or explicit, around Derek. He’s well aware that she doesn’t like the secrecy, even if she loves him too. He’s just selfishly glad she visits.

They’d watched hours of Game of Thrones in blissful silence the last time Derek had seen her, her sock-clad feet pressed to his hip on the couch, the roar of a late autumn storm outside. She’d cracked his last can of Coke open by the fridge and he hadn’t minded so much that the sudden spray of carbon dioxide had left droplets of Coke in his scruff-turning-beard, mostly because she had laughed until he felt like his own smile wouldn’t ever leave. A common misconception in Derek’s life, that. It always leaves him when she does.

Derek vehemently rubs the heels of his palms into his eyes and sticks the right key in the lock.

He ends up shrugging off his jacket and sitting down silently on the edge of the couch upstairs, Stiles’ keys clutched tightly in his hand, trying to remind himself that “appropriate” won’t apply to having a nervous breakdown outside of his own home – especially not with Stiles breathing deeply so close to him, an arm bent over his head and the armrest of the couch and his face slack with sleep. Derek takes in a slow, controlled breath and rubs his thumb over the smooth stone through the gaps in the metal wiring, back and forth until the pad of his finger feels tingly and warm. His vision is narrowed in entirely on the ink on Stiles’ exposed arm, lethargically tracing the lines of black against skin and the clean, white lines parting the soft inside of his forearm like a jigsaw.

His heartbeat slowly, gradually stops roaring so loudly in his ears while he follows the pencil-like strokes up Stiles’ knuckles and counts the dots along the lines, nine in total, anchoring himself with the focus points as his eyes trail along the relaxed bend of Stiles’ long fingers.

“Are you Cullen-ing me?”

Derek drops the keys.

Stiles stretches on the couch and starts rearranging himself. Derek hazily remembers a trip to the movies and Cora commenting on a horrible story line about vampires and werewolves and feels his heart seize up minutely in his chest.

“No,” he defends himself after a few beats, reaching down to pick up the keys. He holds them in his hand for a moment before putting them down on the coffee table between the couches. Stiles, having obviously noticed Derek staring (and this is going to make him feel like a creep for a good while, he realises tiredly), glances down at the scars on his arm, and then back up at Derek, his face still worn-out but otherwise unreadable.

“Look, I know what you were assuming, dude—“

“I wasn’t assuming anything,” Derek cuts him off, and finds himself making eye contact. Derek hadn’t known that blood magic was a thing before seeing it happen earlier that night. He’s not even sure what Stiles did at the subway station, only that it was powerful and that it worked. Derek feels like he’s the last person to judge anyone on their life choices, but he still had a vague, involuntarily conjured picture in his head of someone struggling through the teenage years and only barely making it out on the other side – not a man who, essentially, jumped at the first chance to bleed for him. The thought makes an unexpected shiver race up Derek’s spine into his hairline.

Stiles, to his credit, just smiles slightly.

“Alright.” He tugs the comforter up to his chin, his arms disappearing under it, and then just looks at Derek for what seems like a very, very long time. Derek resists the urge to squirm or snap or do something to get out from under the heat lamp weight of Stiles’ sleep-heavy eyes.  

“You were good back there,” Stiles mutters after a while, eyes closing as he makes himself comfortable again.

“I’ve never done the sharing-thing, I was honestly a little afraid I was going to fry you or something. I’m glad I didn’t.” His voice sounds increasingly indistinct, and Derek’s pretty sure that Stiles is falling asleep again as he speaks. He replies anyway.

“Me too.”

Stiles’ light snoring is the only answer he gets.

 

\---

 

Derek wakes to a shrill noise after what seems like only seconds of sleep, jerking into a wakeful state with the familiarity of someone constantly on guard. It takes him a moment to remember that he isn’t, in fact, at home where he has installed alarms, but in someone else’s apartment with someone else’s alarm clock or the like blaring from downstairs. He fumbles for the phone in the pocket of his jeans and draws it out, momentarily panicking when he sees that it’s almost 5 in the evening, but he’s distracted by the sound of movement from the other couch.

 “What in the cat’s cradle is happening?” Stiles moans, inelegantly trying to wrestle himself out of the straight-jacket his comforter has turned into over-night.  

“It’s the shop phone, dumbass, lie back down,” Scott says, materialising out of nowhere and striding into the living room, pushing Stiles back on the couch on his way towards the stairs. Stiles makes an indignant noise.

“I’m not a child!” he yells after Scott, his voice rough from sleep.

“I know, you just look like one!” Scott yells back from downstairs, the easy banter between them running like a well-oiled machine. Stiles grunts as he sits up, untangling himself from the heap of fabric and setting his feet to the floor. Derek contemplates helping him but thinks better of it. Stiles had proved last night that he preferred doing things himself, so he’ll keep to himself until asked. Instead, Derek swings his own legs over the couch and sits up to inspect his side. Peeling his shirt away from his skin pulls and pinches, dried blood sticking it to his torso, but aside from the itching under the brown-ish residue, he’s entirely healed. Scott had hastily thrown some blankets onto both couches while Derek was lugging Stiles’ unconscious body up the stairs, and they’re definitely both gonna have to go.

“I need a bucket of Froot Loops or something,” Stiles grumbles, pressing a hand to his forehead. Derek stands, flipping the dirty blanket off his couch and bundling it up.

“You need protein and iron, not sugar enough to give someone a seizure.”

Stiles groans and falls dramatically back onto the couch with a thump.

“Oh _god_ , you sound like me around my dad. I knew keeping him from artery-clogging food would come back to bite me in the ass some day.”

Derek huffs out a laugh and heads for the stairs.

He can hear Scott on the phone apologising profusely to someone on the other end, from the shop’s front desk when he reaches the kitchen. The papers and books are still cluttering every available surface, the pizza boxes quickly pushed into an empty space by the sink.

“Mom, I— _mom_ , no, do not do that, okay, nothing’s wrong. We just had too much to drink and forgot about charging phones, I swear,” Scott lies into the phone and glances into the kitchen to acknowledge Derek’s presence with a quick nod. Derek pops an eyebrow, and Scott looks at him frantically, mouthing _help me_. Derek just shakes his head and starts searching through the cupboards he hadn’t gotten into the night before. He finds a carton of orange juice stashed behind an economy-sized package of paper towels, and clears a space for it on the kitchen counter.

Scott finally hangs up the phone with an “I love you too, mom, say hi to the sheriff for me,” followed by a heavy sigh, and joins Derek as he starts trying to locate drinking glasses.

“Seriously, the woman has a sixth sense for trouble or something. Figures she’d call the one day we’re too busted to think about chargers.” Scott runs a hand through his bedhead and then seems to notice the juice and Derek’s searching. He reaches up and plucks a mug from a cabinet, passing them over and reaching for two more.

“Stiles’ dad is much worse though, the man’s paid to notice things, you know?” he continues, pouring juice and handing one to Derek, who traces Scott’s phone conversation back a few paces.

“A sheriff?”

Scott nods, bringing the mug to his mouth and downing all of it in large gulps. After filling it up again, he pulls a chair out by the table and Derek joins him.

“Stiles and I met at the playground when we were like 10, but our parents didn’t get together until we were finishing up high school. Stiles’ dad is a sheriff and my mom’s a nurse.” He looks so proud that Derek can’t stop the side of his mouth from ticking up. He hasn’t sat around having small talk about normal things like parents and jobs for a while, and realising that he doesn’t want Scott to ask about _his_ family, he changes the subject instead.

“Is he going to be okay?” Derek asks, nodding up at the ceiling. Scott smiles reassuringly, setting his mug down.

“He’ll be fine. One of his nasty herb blends and a few more hours of rest and he should be on his feet again. Stiles’ magic runs on a kind of spark. He says it’s like a fire core in his stomach that sort of keeps him going and then expands in whatever way he uses it, sometimes explosively – like yesterday. It’s kind of hard to explain, but pushing it outwards like he did at the station makes him burn out pretty fast – literally.” Fire. Great. The secondary cause of most of Derek’s issues after his own stupidity.

Scott reaches into the pocket of his hoodie and pulls out a piece of paper.

“I wrote down the names Jimmy gave me last night so I wouldn’t forget them,” standing, he picks up the last mug from the kitchen counter and hands the note to Derek. “See if you recognise any of them, I’ll be right back,” and then he heads for the stairs. Derek smoothes out the paper on the table and scans the three names scrawled on it. None of them ring any bells. He’s still trying to search through any recollection of them when Scott returns, tossing a clean shirt at him.

“Anything?” he asks, sitting down again. Derek shakes his head. Scott frowns unhappily.

“Shit. Well, you should clean up at least, you can wear that if you want, I think it’ll fit you alright.” Derek nods and heads for the stairs, by-passing Stiles’ sleeping form on his way to the bathroom.

The dark blue cotton is soft from wash and wear, when Derek finishes rubbing the dried blood out of his skin and pulls it on. It sits a little tight over the chest, but fits just fine otherwise. He avoids the mirror, too aware of the fact that he desperately needs a shave, and not wanting to look himself in the eye.

As far as he is concerned, he has two options. He can keep searching for someone he doesn’t know who is and thus waste precious time, or ask for help. The choice feels obvious. Mostly because, he figures, he’s already too deep in depending on other people to feel further shame about it.

So he calls Deaton.

 

 

                                                                                                      ---                                                                                                    

 

The doorman in front of the velvet rope looks Derek and Scott up and down, his massive arms crossed over his chest. The entrance from the street hadn’t resembled that of a nightclub at all, and the title sign didn’t greet them until they were down two dark flights of stairs. “Ambrosia” looms over the doorman in white neon, like an ominous beacon. Derek smells werewolf all over the shaven-headed mountain of a person and tries not to feel alarmed; they were invited, and he’s absolutely sure that they’re at the right address, even if he feels uncertain about why Deaton would even be there.

Before he and Scott left, Derek had helped Stiles off the couch and over to the table of plants by the living room window. He had watched him snip leaves off a plant that smelled of lemon and mint and picking out wiry, green stalks from an airtight bag. Stiles had instructed Derek to crush the plants in a mortar (“it’s faster with two people, Derek, just give me a hand, okay?”) while he had cut thin slivers of what Derek recognised as ginseng roots and dumped them in a bowl. It had been quick, methodical work, watching Stiles’ measured movements as he added boiling water into the small basin.

“Lemon balm and angelica,” Stiles had said when Derek handed him back the mortar with the lemony green mush, dumping it into the water as well. “It tastes like hell, but it speeds up the healing process.” Stiles’ hands had brushed his every time Derek had passed along little jars of spices and herbs from his end of the table. He had very determinedly kept studying the other plants whenever he felt Stiles glance at him while he mixed.

And now, Derek is apparently having a staring contest with someone he figures isn’t going to just let him inside. The doorman’s steady stare unnerves him.

“We’re here to see Deaton,” he tries, finally, keeping his voice level over the faint music he can hear pulsing from behind the door. The man doesn’t reply. Derek growls under his breath.

“Maybe we need a password, did Deaton give you a password?” Scott asks by his shoulder.

“We don’t need a fucking password,” Derek snarls, his eyes flashing in anger. There’s a minute tick at the man’s mouth, almost a smirk, and then he reaches out and unsnaps the hook of the velvet rope. Derek stares at him for a moment until Scott clears his throat, and they pass the entrance and push through the heavy door.

“I think that might’ve been it,” Scott mumbles, glancing back as the door swings closed. Derek is too busy keeping calm to answer him.

The dimly lit floor of the nightclub is heaving with people, people who smell like magic and want and dormant bloodlust, spicy and feral under the tang of alcohol and sweat. The music pulsating out of the walls feels like a bone-deep ache, sultry and drawling, leading the people grinding against each other at syrupy slow paces.

The club is kept in dark wood and deep red drapes, classy but kind of dramatic if not for the fact that every single guest could be classified as a monster, in one way or another. There’s a dynamic to the crowd, to the groups forming and separating at tables, at the bar, smooth and searching. A wolfed-out woman with stilettos and shock-blonde hair is pressed so closely to a red-headed woman at the bar, that Derek has trouble seeing where their hands have disappeared to. A doe-eyed man with curls and a feral grin behind the bar is talking in hushed tones with an older woman who smells like electricity and charged water. He can hear a group of men and women in a cluster of chunky, dark leather couches talking about what sounds like politics, while they pass a decanter of aconite wine back and forth.

Derek has to effectively drive himself to move his feet forward. Scott sticks close to his side as they head for the door at the back that Deaton had described to them. Derek can feel eyes on him, can hear voices talking about him and Scott, and it’s raising his hackles. He’s straining under the amount of sensory input, used to his silence, but powers on, keeps his shoulders straight and his eyes fixed on his mark.  

He doesn’t bother knocking, and if Deaton is surprised by the sudden entrance, it doesn’t show on his face.

The moment the door slams closed behind Derek, it’s quiet again. Deaton’s office – he has an _office_ in a nightclub, what the hell – is kept much in the same shades of sleek, dark oak as the interior on the other side, but kept simple with a desk, a towering bookcase and a few chairs. There’s a stack of papers and a small collection of items that look antique and full of live energy lined along the table top. It’s so quiet; Deaton probably put a spell on the room, if that’s even possible, and at least for security. Derek has a feeling that the things he felt in the walls of the animal clinic have nothing against what this hub of supernatural traffic must be able to ward off.

“Welcome,” Deaton says, putting down his pen and standing from his desk chair.

“Nice to see you again, mister McCall, how is Stiles doing?” he goes on, coming around the desk. Derek hasn’t seen him in a suit since his cousin Ashley’s naming ceremony.

“He’s resting, thanks – nice to see you too!” Scott hurries to answer. Deaton leans against his desk and addresses Derek, who finds himself stock-still in front of the door, determination halted by Deaton’s calm greeting.

“I don’t know if they told you this, Derek, but Scott used to work for me back when he was in high school.” Scott nods next to Derek, and Deaton goes on, “I had already had Stiles under my wing for a fair number of years, as a favour to his mother, so I thought why not keep them both within my sights at the same time so I could keep them in line.” There’s a good-natured crinkle to his eyes, and Scott ducks his head sheepishly.

“He was a very good vet assistant,” Deaton says. Derek finally clears his throat, and Deaton’s face immediately turns serious. He gestures for two chairs in front of the desk and returns to his own seat.

“Yes, sorry, reminiscing. I understood from your phone call that you ran into some problems last night?”

Derek explains the events of the previous evening as well as he can manage, leaving out the part about Stiles shoving fire down his throat like a circus act because he doesn’t feel that it’s relevant, but also because somehow, it feels too personal. Anyone other than themselves who had seen it happen is dead anyway. Deaton nods, looking more troubled by the minute, until Derek pulls out the list of names Jimmy had given them. Deaton reads it over a few times and then shakes his head.

“I’m sorry, I can’t tell you who these people are, because I don’t know them. The clientele here generally does not encompass hunters. However, and I think you’ll find this part actually useful, we _do_ make our exceptions—“ A knock on the door interrupts Deaton mid-word, and Derek swears under his breath. A woman sticks her head through the doorway.

“Sorry to disturb you,” she apologises when she notices Derek and Scott, “but the Turner pack’s alpha is here to see you about the...” she coughs discreetly, “congregation?”  

Deaton smiles politely and tells her to pour the man a drink and have him wait, and Derek feels a surge of gratefulness. The woman dismisses herself.

“Now, where was I – yes, the exceptions,” Deaton reels back the conversation, folding his hands in front of him on the desk.

“There’s someone you might want to talk to. He quit the hunting business a long time ago, and he’s been a valuable asset so far. I trust him personally, and I’d encourage you to do the same. He might be able to help you identify the people you’re looking for.” A look of wary concern breaks through Deaton’s serious exterior.

“I want you to know that I worry,” he says, levelling Derek with a heavy look. Derek fights a childish urge to shrink in his chair, but he is a man, god dammit, so he meets Deaton’s eyes and nods in understanding.

“These might be dangerous people you boys are meddling with, and while I can’t interfere, it would be a shame to Talia’s memory if I indirectly aided you putting yourself at risk. I want you to be careful, do you understand?”

Derek nods again. He doesn’t know of Deaton having any children, but he definitely does the concerned-dad-look well. With that look of mutual agreement, Deaton stands, and Derek and Scott mimic him.

“Your man usually sits at the end of the bar, and he should be here tonight. He’s worked some security for us under my supervision, and he tends to keep an eye on things. I need to attend to my next appointment, but you give Stiles my wishes for a quick recovery, and let me know how things pan out.”

Scott opens the door, and this time, Derek is more prepared for the onslaught of music and smells. Exiting the office, he now quickly notices the respectful berth the guests are keeping to the door, even as they mingle back and forth. He had known that Deaton was influential, but not to this extreme. His place in the basement club seems like a fortress of power, a base of operations Derek now suspects the vet to have kept for quite some time. He respects that, even if he doesn’t understand the extend of it to its fullest.

They head towards the bar, people obscuring the view of the end of it, until Scott suddenly blurts: “Mister Argent?”

Derek freezes.

Chris Argent straightens on his stool and meets Scott’s gaze dead on, a confused frown on his face.

“Scott? What are you doing here?” Then his eyes flick to Derek, and Derek counts to all of 3 in his head before recognition dawns on Argent’s face. It immediately turns into sharp irritation.

“And what is _he_ doing here?”

Derek clenches his teeth and fists his hands by his sides. He clearly remembers the last time he laid eyes on Christ Argent, in the woods behind the Hale house, not even a year after the fire.

“I—“ Scott begins, looking back at Derek in confusion. “We’re looking for someone—do you two know each other?”

Derek nods, grimly, as does Argent, his face hard as stone.

“His sister burned my family alive,” Derek says bluntly. Scott gapes. Chris snorts and sets down his glass of scotch hard on the bar counter.

“And his uncle did us all the favour of ripping her throat out before he fell over and died behind the husk of the house, so I suppose that makes a pretty picture,” he snaps, defence and being put on the spot written all over his features. Derek clears his head long enough to frown and direct his gaze at Scott.

“How do you know him?” he asks his puzzled companion. Scott splutters, gesturing wildly at Argent.

“I’m dating his daughter, but we—I never heard about any of this,” he manages, before Chris stands abruptly.

“And you weren’t supposed to. We deal with this on our own. I did _not_ want Allison to be a part of this life, and it’s going to stay that way. My family had nothing to do with Kate’s decisions. We took distance from any of the things she had done to you or your family, the moment the truth came to light. Your crazy uncle’s choice to take revenge into his own hands, before anyone managed to get the police involved, was a coincidence that spared court trials and the risk of getting my daughter involved. What Kate did was wrong, but I don’t want Allison to suffer for that, and _I_ am not going to suffer for that. I disowned Kate for what she did to your family, I broke tradition, and lying to Allison about how her aunt died and burying my own sister has to be enough penance.”

Derek has to force himself not to recoil visibly. He hasn’t heard or spoken Kate’s name in years, mainly because the last time it happened was the last time he saw Laura. Things like “why didn’t you do something?” and “how couldn’t you have known?” are jumbling up in Derek’s head until he feels like he might scream or just crack open like an egg, right down the middle.

“Derek’s little sister is missing,” Scott suddenly cuts in, as level-headed and firmly as when he had put Derek in his place after Stiles’ attempt at a location spell. Both Derek and Chris turn towards him. Scott’s arms are crossed and he looks upset, but Derek guesses this is mostly because of the arguing.

“I get that you two have,” he gestures vaguely between Derek and Chris, “a lot of history, but Derek, dude, if we’re going to find your sister, we need to keep our heads on.”

It strikes Derek that for all of Scott’s still remaining humanity, he would make a good alpha, especially with Stiles at his side. The thought of it seems to calm him, if only a little. Shaking his head, Derek takes a deep, controlled breath through his nose. The fact that Scott’s girlfriend is related to the woman Derek let ruin his life isn’t frightening because of the relation, but because of the fact that somehow, his world seems to grow smaller and smaller every passing minute. Beacon Hills is rapidly compacting itself into a tight little cage, where he keeps slamming face-first into traces of Kate Argent’s ghost.

Scott, apparently assessing that Derek has forgotten how to articulate himself, hands Chris the names. The ex-hunter reads them over, and then his face turns dark.

“What.” Derek says without inflection, as Argent reaches back for his scotch and quickly swigs what’s left in the glass.  

“I need to you to keep Allison out of this,” is the first thing Chris says when he sets the empty glass back down, looking at Scott with something Derek must be imagining looks like desperation.

“She’s in Atlanta,” Scott just says, like the span of time his girlfriend is away is all the guarantee he can give so far. Argent seems to take what he can get.

“You have to understand that this hasn’t been my life for a long time,” he begins, sitting down heavily on his stool, suddenly looking like a man who carries more on his shoulders than Derek would have thought.

“Kate and I had been drifting apart even before the Hale fire. We rarely talked, Allison barely knew her. I tried to keep the hunting business away from her until she would be old enough to understand it. Then, when everything went south, I did everything to put this behind us. Kate had been running her own deal further east for a while. It wasn’t hard cutting the tether. We always had our disagreements about how to honour the code, but she always answered loyally to one man, no questions asked.” He hesitates for a moment. The tension in the air seems palpable.

“Our father.”

Chris holds up the note. “These men? They answer to him. You’re looking for Gerard Argent.”

 

 

\---

 

“So,” Stiles says, his forehead creasing, “Scott’s girlfriend’s dad’s sister set your house on fire, and now Scott’s girlfriend’s dad’s _father_ has taken Cora.” He looks at Derek incredulously over the back of the passenger’s seat.

“That’s about it, yeah,” Derek replies. Stiles’ mouth thins out in a heartfelt grimace.

“Wow.”

Scott is probably driving too fast, but even Stiles, whose father is apparently a sheriff, isn’t telling him to slow down. With their luck, they’ll be stopped by the man himself when they get to Beacon Hills for speeding. The address Argent gave them is that of an area of big, industrial green houses on the outskirts of town.  

Stiles is still twisted in his seat, his eyes cast down in contemplation while he presses his mouth against the back of the hand holding him fixed in his awkward position.

“Why did she do it?” he asks, after a long moment, very quietly. There’s a look of concerned sympathy on his face that makes Derek’s breath hitch.

“Because she was insane,” is what he goes with, even though something about the serious line of Stiles’ mouth makes him want to spill everything right there and then, tell someone who doesn’t judge him for what he did, so he can get it out without getting in a life-changing argument again. And also? Also because it feels like Stiles just shared something about himself with just a look. Stiles chews the inside of his cheek.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and Derek knows from the steadiness of his heartbeat that he means it, so he smiles, just a bit. Stiles smiles back and turns around in his seat.

“We should be there in about ten minutes,” Scott announces from the driver’s seat.

“Right,” Stiles says, “I think we need a better plan this time, because last night was shit, and I am not drinking any more angelica-juice for a while if I can help it.” He shudders and makes a disgusted noise, like the thought of it makes him nauseous. Derek gets it, Stiles still smells to hell and back of bitter herbs and lemon. They’d more or less let him roll into the moving car pulling up in front of the shop after leaving Ambrosia in a hurry, Scott handing Derek his phone to call ahead and tell Stiles to meet them outside. No more wasting time. Derek wants his fucking sister back, and he’ll pop Gerard Argent’s head right off his body if that’s what it takes. He is _done_ getting his ass kicked and being run in circles, like a god damn circus horse. He is tired of hunting clues, tired of fumbling in the dark, and he is, most of all, tired of not knowing what’s behind the next door.

If Gerard doesn’t have Cora, Derek is out of options.

He feels like the previous night is repeating itself when he, Stiles and Scott scale the fence and start through the maze of glass structures. According to whatever information Stiles had been able to pull up on his phone during the drive, the area used to belong to a large agriculture company that went under two years ago. The huge plot was taken into custody of the county, and it had been gathering dust and attracting drug addicts until the police got tired of wasting resources patrolling it, and had a new, sturdier fence put up for the time being. Stiles had learned the last part through his father some time ago, which isn’t really useful as such, but the more information about the place they have, the safer they can pretend to be.

Most of the green houses are intact, but there are still huge sections where someone obviously had fun breaking as many window sections as possible, shards littering the ground. They circulate every single one of the structures, ducked low. Even with Stiles bringing his trusted flashlight, they can’t use it because it would attract attention in the darkness. Stiles trips and stumbles, catching himself with a hand on Derek’s shoulder more than once, but he’s a constant at Derek’s side, as aware and attentive as Derek and Scott are despite his limited range of sight.

“We can’t know what to expect this time,” Stiles had said in the car, rubbing his hands together in the cold. “This isn’t another Jimmy and his merry band of social rejects. Gerard has been a hunter for a really long time, so I doubt just sneaking up on him is going to be easy. My best guess is tracking them down, assessing the situation and them doubling back for better planning.”

When Derek had made a dissatisfied noise from the backseat, Stiles hadn’t even sassed him back, just looked over his shoulder at Derek like he understood why it bothered him. It does bother Derek, not having a better, more elaborate plan, but Stiles was right. His strategic thinking might even help Derek not get his head blown off.

Derek catches a whiff of something when they get to the east side of the area and stands to his full height to scent the air.

“Are you slow in the head or something, get down!” Stiles hisses somewhere around the height of Derek’s waist.

Derek bats at him to shut him up. There are people in the next green house over, one with an attached building of solid concrete. Stiles slaps his hand away.

“If you want to get shot that badly, _I’ll_ shoot you!”

“Shut up, Stiles,” Derek retorts. He’s trying to listen for movement or something else to go with the scent. It smells off. Something is clearly wrong, but Derek can’t quite pinpoint what it is until the moment when he suddenly can. Panic crashes into him.

“Derek—“ Stiles says, suddenly sounding worried as he stands and places a hand on Derek’s shoulder. 

Under the scent of people, plants and wet earth, there’s the smell of hot, sour metal. The unmistakeable tang of blood.

“They’re dead,” Derek grits out. He can locate just one heartbeat, and it’s stuttering and slow. Stiles goes completely still beside him. His hand is hot, even through the jacket. Derek tries to swallow around the lump in his throat. If it isn’t Cora who’s still hanging onto life by her nails, then—

“Fuck it, that’s it,” Stiles says heatedly as he moves forward, “we’re going in.”

It takes Scott giving him a push to make Derek follow. He doesn’t want to find his sister dead, and more so, he isn’t ready to find out and face what they’ve done to her.

There are four bodies on the floor at the far end of the green house. The heartbeat belongs to Gerard Argent, who is heaving shallow breaths on the cool stone floor next to a large ventilation fan covered in spider webs. Derek recognises him from Kate’s funeral, which he observed from a safe distance to look out for possible threats in the turn-up. There are wide spots of murky yellow light by the massive steel door leading towards the silo close to where Gerard’s men are sprawled in various stages of frozen agony, their eyes staring at nothing, blood leaking from ears, noses, mouths. One of them has a trail of it running from the inner corner of his eye over the bridge of his nose.

Derek can already feel his universe crumbling inwards when he bends down to yank Gerard up by his collar. There’s a roaring anger pulsating somewhere at his core when the man manages to focus on him and then smiles a slow, sickening smile. There’s blood in his mouth, outlining his teeth grotesquely where it sits between the gaps.

“The assholes have been cultivating wolfsbane,” Stiles says with disgust somewhere behind Derek. “It’s bad stock, most of it is dead, but I’d say they’ve been at it for a while.”

Derek isn’t listening, not really. He’s clenching his fists in the lapels of Gerard’s jacket, pulling him up until they’re so close he can feel the man’s short, rasping breaths against his face. Gerard stares him down in contempt the best he can with the life ebbing out of him.

“What did you do?” Derek asks, his voice a low, dangerous sound rumbling from the centre of his ribcage.

“You’re a damn dog,” Gerard scoffs, his throat rattling. Derek shakes him harder than he intends to.

“What the hell did you do?!” Derek yells, his claws tearing the thick fabric of the collar. Gerard coughs violently, and Derek rips his face away to avoid the spray of saliva and blood.

“I did what anyone would do!” the old man shouts back, voice crackling like static. Derek is breathing fast, staring so hard at Gerard that his eyes are going dry.

“The likes of you shouldn’t be allowed to walk in broad daylight, let alone associate with real people,” he drawls, “it’s filthy. One thing is getting up on your hind legs and playing human, but you squander your healing abilities on your feral lifestyles in your sweet little monster pods and packs. You don’t know about terminal illness and you treat serious injury like office workers treat paper cuts, because you heal up nice afterwards. But that only proves how dangerous you are, doesn’t it?” Gerard lets out a croaking, breathless laugh.

“But you can’t heal anyone else. Egocentric beasts without compassion, never giving, always taking—this was supposed to _fix_ me!” he snaps, visibly fighting back another coughing fit. A trickle of blood starts from his left nostril.

“Why Cora? Why another Hale?” Derek asks. He can feel Gerard slipping, going heavier in his grip, and he needs answers. He doesn’t know why, doesn’t know why they matter.

“Poetic justice?” Gerard sneers, baring his blood-stained teeth. Derek sees red. His hand is wrapped around Gerard’s throat before he can stop himself.

“Derek!”

He halts, claws just barely cutting into skin.

“We found her!” Scott calls, disappearing through the large, rusty door. Derek lets Gerard drop without a second thought and scrambles after him, his heart beating wildly somewhere around the back of his throat.

Stiles is in the middle of the barren concrete floor, on his knees, and in front of him lies Cora, limp and pale in the harsh overhead light. Derek rushes forward, but Scott stops him.

“No, no, no—Derek, wait!” His hands latch onto Derek’s left arm.

“You gotta let him work, okay?”

Stiles is murmuring to himself as he checks Cora over with quick, routine-like movements, but whether he’s chanting or just talking to himself out of habit, Derek doesn’t know. Then he looks up and finds Derek.

“I need your help, do you know CPR?” Stiles calls, and Scott lets go of Derek so he can join Stiles on the floor, his head spinning from how quickly he drops to his haunches. Derek nods mutely and sets his hands to the middle of Cora’s chest. He panics for a moment when he doesn’t feel a heartbeat, but Stiles breaks into it with an ease Derek hasn’t experienced with anyone.

“Derek, I need you to keep doing chest compressions while I work at her head, okay? I know this is super hard, and I know you’re freaking out, but I’m going to get her back, alright?” When Derek doesn’t reply, too busy trying to figure out how hard to press, Stiles looks up momentarily from where he’s unscrewing the lid of a small bottle of sweet-smelling herbs, and ducks in front of Derek to regain eye contact.

“Trust me. Okay?”

And the thing is, Derek does. It’s weird, because Derek is an asocial man by choice who still knows the damn check-out girl at the grocery store better than he knows Stiles and yet, he finds himself meeting the set of sincere brown eyes and nodding because he _does_. He trusts that Stiles is going to bring his sister back, trusts that the way they work together almost seamlessly isn’t a hoax, or a trap. While Stiles sets the bottle down next to Cora’s head, Derek keeps at the chest compressions, the methodical, repetitive work. He still can’t get a heartbeat.

“Two fucking days in a row, man,” Stiles mutters, seemingly to himself, and hefts the small knife he’d cut himself with the night before. The incision this time is smaller, done with surgical precision now that he doesn’t have a gun pointing at him. He smears a good handful of the contents from the bottle into the blood dripping down into the cradle of his hand, and, using his ring fingers like pens, starts tracing thin, clean lines of it along Cora’s collarbones, up her throat, her chin, swiping over her nose and across her cheekbones, until he is slowly drawing a spiral on her forehead, trance-like and flowing. Derek’s arms are aching, but his eyes keep tracing the spiral as it forms, round and round towards the gradually narrowing centre.

Cora’s chest heaves so suddenly that Stiles pulls his hands away so quickly he slaps Derek in the ear, and Derek automatically grabs his wrist, his stomach flipping. Pushing herself up off the floor, Cora only gets as far as half-way before Derek is crushing her into a one-armed hug, his nose pressing into her unruly hair and Stiles’ blood on her face rubbing off against his neck. Derek doesn’t mind one bit. He clutches her tighter, feels her hands fist in the back of his jacket, breathes in the familiar, faint scent of the honestly kind of horrible perfume she likes to wear, and tries to tamp down an urge to cry.

If he doesn’t let go of Stiles’ wrist for a while, and Stiles doesn’t say anything about it, nobody else has to know.

 

 

\---

 

Gerard isn’t breathing anymore when they re-enter the green house. Cora is still weak on her feet, and Derek isn’t quite ready to physically let go of her yet, so he’s glad to support her weight as they get her propped up on a crate so Scott can look her over. Derek is sceptical about how much good that will actually do, but Scott’s mother being a nurse and the fact that he used to work for Deaton hints at some knowledge Derek guesses is useful – just in case.

He lays a hand over the back of her neck under her hair and squeezes briefly before heading for Stiles, keeping a wide berth around the bodies on the floor. Stiles is squatting by a tarp he’s pulled off a low table. A table covered with chalk symbols and bowls full of liquid and herbs that make Derek’s face scrunch up.

“What is that?” he asks, drawing Stiles’ attention. Stiles glances back at him and then stands.

“This is heavy-duty stuff, man, you don’t mess with this kind of hoodoo just for kicks.” He reaches out, grabs a bowl filled with some kind of animal blood and takes a cautionary sniff before putting it back. “I’ve never seen anything like this, though.”

Derek scans the symbols for anything familiar.

“Hoodoo is mainly African, right?”

Stiles nods.

“That’s a Celtic tree, though,” Derek says, pointing at the large symbol in the middle of the table. “That’s not right, is it?”

Stiles shakes his head. “European hoodoo is super influenced by Christian symbolism and prayer, but paganism? Not so much. I’m not big on mixed magic like this, it gets messy really fast. And it’s complicated, I doubt Gerard could have figured this out on his own.”

He turns to face Derek fully and crosses his arms, uncertain in a way Derek hasn’t seen until now.

“I guess the whole point of it was to draw on Cora’s healing or something, like her life force? If Gerard was sick, I guess that it could have worked – in theory. But there are herbs in here that would pretty effectively make the whole thing backfire.” He glances at the bodies over Derek’s shoulder. “I guess that’s what killed them. It literally tears you up from the inside, that shit ain’t pretty. I just don’t understand why they’d go through this much trouble and then end up with the equivalent of using Anthrax instead of sugar in your coffee.”

“Bad intel?” Derek suggests. Stiles purses his lips as he starts pacing.

“Maybe. But we’re talking Grandpa of Hunters here, like, the big Kahuna, he wouldn’t get his do-it-yourself-hoodoo kit from just anyone, couldn’t, really, because like I said the whole mixed magic thing is a powerful bastard to master. This is not something anyone can just go learn at a weekend course. It would need a seriously powerful practitioner. If they’d go this far to help him, why sabotage the whole ritual—“

Stiles stops suddenly.

“Son of a bitch.”

“What?” Derek asks. Stiles’ mouth is making a perfect “o”, his eyes wide as he turns to face Derek.

“Deaton.” 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know why I keep ending the chapters with character lines, wth.  
> There's no saying how many hours I've spent going through my magical plants encyclopaedia, but I think we're talking double digits here. 60% of working with this beast is doing research. On everything. Seriously, everything, from breakfast cereals to African folk religions.
> 
> A little message from GEA: "I'm so thrilled that you people like our little creation, and I hope the art helps to fuel the imagination!"


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is quite a bit shorter than the last three, but it's no less important to the story. Seeing as the 24th is only a few days away, GEA and I wish all of you a happy Christmas! The last chapter will be up (hopefully) next Sunday.

[ ](http://s4.photobucket.com/user/leechys/media/null_zpsb24b1bd0.jpg.html)

art by [Girleverafter](http://girleverafter.tumblr.com/)

 

Derek and Cora pull off from the highway on the way to Pollock Pines to get something to eat. After a little over an hour’s rest in the car, Cora’s appetite had finally returned, and she had started complaining that she hadn’t eaten in days, twisting moodily in her seat like she was trying to wring her stomach into stop growling.

As far as Derek is concerned, his sister complaining is a good sign.

They park the car by an all-night diner, Derek stalling for half a second as he glances at his sister before they get out and walk to the entrance in silence. They’d swung by Ye Olde Magic Shop with Stiles and Scott before the trip, letting Cora take a much needed shower and borrow a set of Scott’s girlfriend’s clothes to replace her dirty ones that had still smelled like spell-work and wolfsbane. After borrowing the shop phone and calling Laura (a conversation between the sisters that Derek very intently had made sure not to listen in on) they more or less ran for Derek’s car. Stiles had stuck close to Derek’s side inside, a fixed point of somewhat stability in the rush to get Cora home, his hand brushing Derek’s arm when they’d hurried out the door. There was a moment when Derek glanced back over his shoulder, already in full stride down the road where he’d parked the Camaro, and found Stiles still standing on the stoop of the shop in the dark, a strange smile on his face.

With the smile burning at the back of his eyelids whenever he blinked, Derek had ushered Cora into the car and drove away.

They split a plate of fries and Cora orders a sandwich for herself, more or less inhaling half of it to satisfy her immediate hunger and then slowly nibbling down the rest. Derek can’t help watching her as she eats, creepy as it may be. The past few days’ worth of dread is subsiding from its position lodged in the pit of his stomach, but he’s honestly still a little scared that he’s going to wake up any moment and find himself on a medical slab, out of his mind on wolfsbane-induced hallucinations or something.  

Reaching out to snag one of the fries, Cora looks up at him.

“You okay?” she asks, scooping ketchup onto her plate. Derek just shrugs. Cora frowns disapprovingly.

“You worry too much,” she declares, putting down her food and crossing her arms over the table between them. “You have to let this go. It’s over, right? I’m alive and kicking and Argent is rotting in a green house, I think that’s a fair turn-out. I’m not saying there won’t possibly be fallout to deal with down the line, but right now, I’m surprisingly good.” She flashes him a slanted smile.

When Derek feels his face pull into a sad expression he can’t hold back, the smile disappears and she reaches out and takes his hand in a firm hold. She always was much stronger than him. Her and Laura both. He looks down at the table cloth, feeling frustratingly cheerless and too big crowded into the small corner booth. Cora squeezes his hand. She doesn’t say anything, just lets Derek cover their hands with his other one, fingers resting lightly against her wrist to feel her pulse, thumping reassuringly and calmly against the pad of his thumb.

“Thanks for coming for me,” Cora mutters, very softly, and Derek holds her hand a little tighter. It almost feels like he’s saying goodbye without actually saying it, and she doesn’t even know.

 

\---

 

Cora gives him directions from the diner all the way to Pollock Pines. Derek’s never ventured further than Sacramento, and even then, only when he’d had to look for her. It’s the middle of the night when they pull up by a large, two-story house with a cream-coloured façade and a blue roof, surrounded by clusters of trees that seem to go on forever. There are several cars parked out front, at the end of the long drive-way. The place, for all its differences, reminds Derek of the Hale house in a way he doesn’t want to examine too closely.

The area smells like pine and sap and healthy ground, the air cool as he gets out of the car after Cora. He can hear people inside, and there are lights on in the whole house despite the late hour; they’re probably waiting for their missing pack member to come home. Realising, with a sudden burst of rare clarity, that his family has a family of their own that Derek’s never met, makes something painful twinge in his gut. Cora turns around and looks at him nervously. They never talked about what might happen if Derek came to Pollock Pines, how Laura would react. Derek doesn’t _want_ to talk about it, never really imagined things going back to what they were.

Laura had tried, really _tried_ , to handle her emotions when it came out what had really caused the fire. What Derek had done. Suddenly being an alpha and a guardian for two younger siblings when she was only just legal herself – Derek understood, still understands, why that was hard. The weight of the guilt he had been drowning in coupled with the blame she had done her best not to feel, had meant that Derek was rarely ever home, avoiding the ache looking at his strong, innocent sisters brought him. Derek at 16 wasn’t strong or innocent; he didn’t belong. Laura knew where he went, but she never followed him. None of them had known what to do with the pain.

They had stayed in Beacon Hills for a few years, on the other side of town. He’d spent his time running every night, had dropped out of school and pulled himself away from Laura and the way she looked at him like she was growing exhausted with fighting to understand. Cora had followed him when he’d run, sometimes, her shorter legs somehow still able to keep up with him as he crossed the town to the preserve, to Hale ground. She had always stopped there, though, never followed him over the invisible line. Derek never knew why he kept going back; maybe it was a poor attempt at _some_ kind of self-punishment to make up for the kind he felt like he deserved. The first time he managed his full shift at almost 18 was the most painful thing he had done in his life – not just physically. The shift tuned up his senses suddenly in a way he hadn’t felt before, amplified the fading smells of dead family members and ages-old scent markings that kept bombarding him from every angle of the preserve until he was on the ground, howling out his grief until he felt like he was going to spit out his heart.

Cora had been there that night, at the edge of the woods, howling back at him, anchoring him, even as his bones rearranged and cracked and burned. Sometimes, Derek thinks that was the only reason he came back from the forest and the shift at all.

It strikes Derek that he’ll have to run alone now. The wild chaos of the last few days just galvanized what Derek has long suspected to be the truth; he’s a danger to get close to, period. A risk for the people he loves. Derek knows he can’t afford to be selfish anymore – he’d rather be alone, and know that Cora is safe under the watchful eye of her alpha, than go through anything like this again. Next time they might not be as lucky.

He doesn’t want to say goodbye, feels hollow around the words as they form far down in his throat. But this isn’t about what Derek wants. An emotion, almost too massive to fit inside his ribcage, is beginning to well up when Derek moves to pull Cora into a hug, but then the front door opens and he freezes, just inches from her. When Laura comes storming down the front steps, her cheeks fuller and her quick stride steadier than the last time he saw her, Derek considers running; just running and not looking back. He doesn’t. Instead, he finds himself standing completely still, heart pounding as he waits for whatever hell is about to rightly hit him.

It doesn’t happen.

Laura steps right into the space between him and Cora, flings an arm around his neck and one over Cora’s shoulders. The strength of it knocks the breath right out of Derek as Laura crushes him in her hold, her head of auburn hair pushing against his cheek.

After a long, tense moment of desperately trying to send his arms signals to move, he manages to very slowly reach up and cradle the back of Laura’s head in his palm. On his other side, Cora is pushing her forehead into his shoulder and mumbling; “I better not fucking wake up in a moment, or I swear—“

Laura giggles wetly against his throat.

Taking a long, shuddering breath he feels like he’s been trying to suck in for years, Derek folds his arms tightly around the both of them.

 

\---

 

He doesn’t leave Pollock Pines until late in the afternoon the next day. The sun is obscured by a thick layer of murky clouds, and the air is clammy and cold with incoming rain, but Derek feels lighter than he has in years. The rain starts just as he’s reaching San Francisco, but instead of taking the highway exit towards Beacon Hills, Derek finds himself driving towards the magic shop. The windshield wipers on his car are swishing rapidly back and forth to rid the front window of water until he pulls into an empty parking space and jogs the short distance to the magic shop. His shoes are soppy and his hair is plastered to his skull and dripping into his eyes by the time he raps his knuckles against the dark entrance. A light comes on further inside, and then Stiles is there, unlocking and opening the door. Derek remains standing in the rain for a moment, water running down his face, suddenly not entirely sure what to say; he didn’t have Stiles’ phone number, and he’s actually pretty sure he left his cell phone somewhere anyway, because he can’t find it. Is he there to thank them? Before he can lead himself towards a conclusion, Stiles is stepping aside and quirking an eyebrow at him.

“Are you coming in, or are you just gonna stand there and drip on the welcome mat?”

Derek huffs, the tightness in his shoulders receding, and steps inside. Stiles disappears briefly into the kitchen to retrieve a newspaper he can set his shoes on, and for some reason, it doesn’t feel that awkward when Derek then follows him upstairs.

Stiles had obviously been in the middle of working when Derek showed up. There are plant samples spread over the coffee table, a cataloguing folder with spaces for writing and little see-through pockets filled with herbs and leaves open on the couch.

“Where’s Scott?” Derek asks, noticing the lack of another heartbeat in the apartment. Stiles plops down on the couch, closes the folder, and slides it onto the table.

“He went to Atlanta. Something about the last few days made him miss Allison something fierce, so,” he replies, shooting Derek a crooked smile. Then he seems to remember something, and reaches into the back pocket of his jeans. “You forgot your phone,” he says, and what do you know, out from the confines of his clothes comes Derek’s cell phone. Derek reaches out and takes it.

“Thanks.” He turns it in his hands a couple of times and then pockets it. He has a strange urge to shuffle his feet, but he sits down instead, torn between saying his thanks and leaving, and staying for no good reason other than the company. Apparently, Stiles takes that as his cue to reach for the remote to the television and flip it on. They sit in silence for a while; Derek perched on the far end of the same couch Stiles is sitting on, watching the science program without really paying attention.

“Did Cora get home okay?” Stiles asks, after a little while, melting a little more comfortably into his seat. Derek gradually leans a little more firmly into his spot on the couch as well.

“Yeah. She got her appetite back around Sacramento, so she’s fine. Or, well. As fine as can be expected. Better, actually.” Beside him, Stiles hums with approval, and when Derek glances over at him, he’s looking back, and there’s the same strange smile on his face as when they’d left the shop. Ears suddenly burning, Derek turns back to the television.

“Do you actually understand any of this?” he asks, gesturing at the screen where a voice-over is talking about a super comet. Stiles snorts.

“I think you’d have to be a pretty advanced astronomist to actually totally _understand_ this, but that doesn’t mean it’s not interesting.”

They end up watching the program to its end and discussing whether or not it was complete bullshit; Derek thinks yes, so Stiles rapidly spins into a long explanation about how planetary elements are important to science and why Derek, obviously, is a total moron. The television is left on mute, and it’s almost midnight when Derek finally drives back to Beacon Hills, wondering how the hell they went from talking about super comets, to discussing the likelihood of werewolves being able to get rabies.

 

\---

 

Derek returns to the magic shop the next day, and the day after that as well. After consulting Scott over the phone, Stiles had concluded that they needed some time off, even though closing up for a while this close to Christmas admittedly isn’t too good for business.

And Derek? Well, he’s secretly a little happy about it. Spending time with Stiles when his world isn’t falling down around him is actually nice. Sometimes pleasant, even (if you choose not to count in the fact that Stiles is, in fact, more or less still just a mouthy teenager with a serious sarcasm problem and a talent for getting himself into trouble, judging from the stories he tells Derek, but he’s smart too, sharp as a tack). Just sitting around talking and getting Stiles to teach him more about the whole magic thing almost feels normal – aside from the fact that they’re talking about magic. Derek hasn’t really done that since high school, the hanging out thing, not with anyone but Cora. Stiles can talk a mile a minute, but he can also be quiet, companionably silent when they take a walk after Stiles has been taking Derek through about 200 years worth of magic history one evening. He even lets Derek see the disaster of a kitchen upstairs, almost fixed up again, just waiting for a plumber to come in and do the finishing touches after New Year’s. Apparently he had been playing around with some sort of concoction that turned out to be pretty explosive.

“At least I wasn’t in the room when it blew up,” Stiles muses as they trudge down the steps to the first floor. “Allison chewed me out for it though, which is totally understandable. I can’t really be setting the house on fire by accident when there’s going to be a baby living here soon, you know? Even if she gets Scott’s furry genes, she’s not going to be bulletproof.”

“Are you still going to live here when they have the kid?” Derek asks, bending down to tie his shoelaces, glancing up at Stiles who leans his hip against the wall and crosses his arms over his chest. He shrugs.

“I guess. I offered to find a place of my own, but they said they,” he does air quotes, “didn’t mind keeping me around.”

Derek snorts. “I can’t really imagine you being a babysitter though.” Straightening up, he pulls his jacket down from the hanger. Stiles’ face twists in a mock-outraged look, and he clutches at his chest.

“Ouch, Derek, seriously. Ouch.”

Derek chuckles as he stuffs his arms into the jacket sleeves. When he looks back up at Stiles, he’s staring at him. Derek pops an eyebrow. “What?”

Stiles purses his lips and then smiles a small, private-looking smile that does funny things to Derek’s stomach. “You’re different.”

Derek frowns and shifts slightly on the spot, squaring his shoulders out of old habit. “What do you mean different?”

“I mean you’re different,” Stiles repeats, and then goes on when Derek opens his mouth to interrupt, “when you’re not, you know. Vibrating with anxiety.” He shrugs his shoulders almost uncomfortably, like he hadn’t expected Derek to now be staring back. Which he is. Derek doesn’t think that’s unfair, really; he’s not the one going around dropping that kind of weird lines like they don’t mean anything. Which they probably don’t, he realises, and diverts his eyes so Stiles will at least stop looking embarrassed.

“I guess being around you is good for anxiety then,” Derek mutters, stuffs a hand in his jacket pocket, and reaches for the shop door. He’s afraid he just made things weird, which is stupid, because he likes seeing Stiles like this. He kind of likes Stiles too. With a small flare of panic, Derek reaches out to twist the dead bolt, when Stiles touches his back, an almost hesitant tap.

“I, uh—see you tomorrow, maybe? If you still want to watch the game together?” Stiles is already pulling his hand back when Derek turns, and he’s biting at the inside of his cheek. Derek smiles, feeling something warm tickling at the back of his mind.

“See you tomorrow.”

 

\---

 

Stiles has a dark look on his face when Derek shows up the next morning, two paper cups of to-go coffee in hand to passively make up for the awkward goodbyes the night before. He gets as far as the kitchen and is about to ask what’s wrong (if it’s him, or if Scott is okay, if he should leave), when Stiles makes an unusually violent gesture, grabbing a mug from the counter in front of him and throwing it forcefully into the sink. It doesn’t break, but the loud clang of the impact and the action itself is so unlike Stiles that Derek feels himself stiffen up.

“Jimmy got killed last night. I had his second showing up here early in the morning banging on the door and threatening to blow my head off,” Stiles says, dropping down in a chair and rubbing a hand over his hair in frustration. Derek frowns and slowly takes a seat across from him.

“I sent him scurrying quickly enough, but seriously, what the fuck?” Stiles continues, throwing out his hands in front of him and looking incredulously at Derek. They’d all seemed fine with Jimmy running off to wherever he wanted after the fight; there had been no need to take care of him if he just kept out of their business. Derek doesn’t feel the need for unnecessary bloodshed if he can help it – not anymore, at least. Without thinking, he reaches out and traps one of Stiles’ restless hands under his. Stiles looks stressed. He sits quietly for a moment, looking down at their hands, a frown creasing his forehead. Derek can’t get himself to let go, even though he probably should.

“It’s got to do with Deaton, I just know it,” Stiles mutters. They haven’t talked about it since the night at the green houses. Derek doesn’t want to consider the possibility that the man he chose to trust – the man his mother trusted – might be up to something, and Stiles obviously doesn’t either. He was his apprentice, after all. Derek finds himself rubbing his thumb along one of the blue-black lines on the back of Stiles’ hand.

“Something’s just off about this whole thing,” Stiles continues, eyes still fixed on their hands. Derek _really_ should pull his away. 

“And this isn’t really our business anymore, I guess – your sister is home, Gerard deep-sixed it good. We don’t know what Deaton wants, it might not even be something bad,” Stiles says, but there’s something leading in his voice, probably unintentional. Derek bites, without even wanting to. He already has a sinking feeling that they’re going to have to get involved in this.

“If Deaton is involved, the fact that they took Cora is on him as well, he shouldn’t get away with that.” He hesitates for a moment, grimaces, and adds; “You two shouldn’t have to do this, I dragged you into it.”

“No, you didn’t,” Stiles says immediately, his hand turning and his long fingers suddenly curling around Derek’s wrist. It’s almost like a current of shock.

“Deaton dragged us both into this, whatever it is, full intent, full stop. It’s not your fault.” He seems to notice his hard grip on Derek’s wrist, Derek staring at him, and lets go, fisting his hands on the table top. Derek misses the contact instantly.

“What if he just needed us to take out witnesses that knew he’d set Argent up?” Stiles suggests.

“It’s a distinct possibility,” Derek replies. Stiles nods to himself.

“Then he probably did know about Cora. I guess it’d be useful for him to have some kind of way to… motivate you to get at Jimmy and his crickets. He probably didn’t count on survivors. Do you think he’s on to us knowing?”

“Probably.”

“Then I don’t see any reason to hang back and hope someone else figures out his possibly evil plot,” Stiles concludes. He already seems less agitated as he moves through implications and works towards something that might be resembling a plan of action. Derek finds he likes that about him.

“Evil plot?” Derek repeats, mouth curling at the corners despite himself.

Stiles grins at him then, all teeth, so Derek fights his feelings of restraint and leans across the table to kiss him. It’s the simplest thing, really, like counting to three and jumping in at the deep end. His mind goes wonderfully blank because this close, Stiles’ scent hits him like a full-on assault, drowning out anything else but that and the soft press of lips as his eyes slip closed. Stiles goes pliant against Derek’s mouth immediately, like he’s fucking _relieved_ , his lips warm and a little chapped, his right hand coming up to twist in the front of Derek’s shirt. Derek can feel his blood singing with excitement and relief and a little bit of horror, and his hipbones are digging into the table hard, but he stops thinking (mostly) when Stiles tilts his head and slips Derek’s bottom lip into the divot between both of his, smooth chin scraping against Derek’s stubble.

“Mmm,” Stiles says against his mouth, so Derek pulls back and looks at him in question, his face burning.

“We have murder, mayhem, mystery,” Stiles says, pausing to lean in and press his closed mouth to Derek’s again with a small sound of want, using his grip on Derek’s shirt to pull him closer.

“And beefcake. It doesn’t start with an m, but we should be on day-time television.”

His smile is the most incredible thing Derek has ever seen. 


	5. Chapter 5

[ ](http://s4.photobucket.com/user/leechys/media/null_zps8e1c5f80.jpg.html)

art by [Girleverafter](http://girleverafter.tumblr.com/)

 

They’ve been in the Camaro on the way to Beacon Hills for a solid 15 minutes, before Stiles suddenly jerks upright from where he’d been leaning back in his car seat. The seatbelt snaps tight over his chest immediately, and Derek flinches, almost swerving into the opposite lane.

“Dude, where the fuck does he live?” Stiles asks loudly, turning towards Derek. Derek’s mouth falls open, just so. Shit. They hadn’t actually thought about that.

“I—actually, I don’t know,” he admits, frowning at the road. Admittedly, he’d had Stiles’ mouth on the side of his throat, and Stiles’ hands dipping up the back of his shirt for a good while before they’d gotten in the car, so in all honesty, looking Deaton up in the yellow pages hadn’t been their first priority. Derek had just wanted to keep Stiles close, for a little while. It had almost felt like they’d been re-charging, preparing for what might happen when they got back to Beacon Hills. He needed it, whatever _it_ was, a little longer, while he had it. While he had Stiles.

In between trading kisses and Derek tracing the lines on the back of Stiles’ hand with his mouth, neither of them had really thought about the possibility that Deaton might not want to be found after the recent disputes. Derek, himself, had been way more focused on the way the vein in Stiles’ neck had jumped under his fingers, when he’d built up the courage to brush his tongue along the seam of Stiles’ mouth. What a sad excuse for an intelligent, alert apex predator he is.

They end up heading for the animal clinic, but even before getting out of the car, Derek is pretty sure it’s empty. He and Stiles go around the back, peeking in through the dark windows, while Derek listens for a human heartbeat among the several small ones of critters and dogs and cats, a few of which suddenly start beating just a little faster when they smell him on the other side of the glass.

“He’s not here,” Stiles tells him, coming around from the other side of the building, and Derek nods, stepping away from the window and the terrified animals on the other side, to head back to the car. They sit in silence for a moment, Stiles chewing thoughtfully at the inside of his lip, Derek drumming his fingers against the steering wheel.

“What about the nightclub? Ambrosia?” Stiles suggests, pulling a bent knee up on his seat to lean his side into the backrest and look at Derek.

“Have you ever been there?” Derek asks. Stiles shakes his head.

“Nah, it’s not really my thing. I’ve heard about it, of course.” He waves a hand vaguely in the air. “Like, their customers and all. Should be a nice place, if you’re slightly less on the human side or tend to dabble with supernatural things. I didn’t know Deaton had an office there until you and Scott came home and told me about it though.”

Derek starts the car while Stiles buckles himself in, pulling away from the animal clinic in the over-cast afternoon light. It’s not a very far drive to the club, which is most likely closed at this time of day, but Derek has a feeling Deaton might be there, in his hub of power, behind his warded office walls.

“You need to understand who Deaton is if we’re going to talk to him about something like this,” Stiles says, after a while. Derek grunts.

“I know him, Stiles. He was the emissary for my family as far back as I can remember—“

“No, Derek,” Stiles interrupts him, turning in his seat again.

“You need to know _who_ he is. Deaton was an emissary once, yes, but this is now, and that’s not who he is anymore. He’s neutral, which is not just about keeping his slate clean and his cards close to his body, but the important part about this is the fact that he’s the most powerful man I’ve ever met, no joke.” Stiles looks uncomfortable for a moment. It makes Derek uneasy.

“I’ve seen what he can do to people who don’t play by the cosmic rules, okay? There was this guy, Matt, who dabbled with some heavy stuff. This was back when I was still in college. I did some investigation and found out what he was doing to some people living around campus, and I asked Deaton to help me out. Dude was taking away people’s voices, and acting like a reckless dick with powers he pretty obviously didn’t know how to conduct himself around.”

“Taking their voices? Stiles, seriously,” Derek says, taking a smaller road towards the club. Taking someone’s voice sounds like a magical prank to him, like hypnosis or something equally harmless. Stiles makes an impatient noise.

“ _Yes_ , Derek, seriously – taking _away_ someone’s voice isn’t just taking away their ability to speak. This guy was experimenting for the hell of it with taking away people’s right to speech and getting in their heads from afar. Deaton might have already assumed a neutral position around the time all that shit went down, but he’s never been a bad man, and he’s _always_ followed the rules of power balance for _good_ , and Matt wasn’t good. He got drunk with the power he had and started escalating, royally cocking up and almost killing a family of four.”

 _Now_ , Derek is listening. While they idle at a stop sign, he takes a good, long look at the expression on Stiles’ face, something that looks disturbed and vaguely queasy. Stiles’ eyes are firmly on the road in front of them, like telling Derek this story is something he would rather think back on as disconnectedly as possible.

“Taking someone’s voice with force sounds simple enough, and the term _really_ doesn’t cover the actual practise, I’ll grant you that one. It kind of, I don’t know, deletes them. It’s a violent, invasive action that blocks their ability to form words. It’s not like putting the vocal chords on pause; you literally lose the ability to think cohesively. It’s like taking a stick and swirling it around an ant hill. No order, just a chaotic mess. It goes against every law of nature telling you to not fuck with the biology of other beings. It might not be loud or explosive, but ripping away that part of someone leaves a permanent tear in the inner fabric of what we’re made up off,” he explains, face only growing grimmer.

“Like the soul?” Derek asks, frowning at the license plate on the car in front of them as the light turns green.

“Yeah, you could say that,” Stiles replies. “The students around school only served as a few test runs, though. There was this couple with two kids who lived close to campus, but not on it. Which is probably why I didn’t realise sooner? Well, Matt was needling at them like guinea pigs, until he managed to make his spell work, and it kind of… got out of control. He’d been tutoring their daughter, this freshman kid at a local high school, weaselling himself into their home on a weekly basis. He’d probably started taking away their general way of expressing themselves, and then moved on to little bits of how they connected their own thoughts. I didn’t find out about it until there were ambulances screaming away from the house one day. We managed to corner Matt when he was making his very swift exit from campus that night. He wasn’t exactly happy that I’d brought Deaton with me, he’d never even heard of him. I think he was from some little dot on the map up North.”

“What happened to the family?” Derek interjects, realising that Stiles was about to pass over that pretty significant detail. Stiles looks down at his lap at his hands.

“They’d gone into collective seizures in their home when the spell went from a slow-burning umber to a fully fledged inferno. Something inside them had just kind of slipped, when their ability to even voice thoughts in their heads completely vanished. They had this little girl who was like seven, I think, and she was in a medically induced coma for a month. The parents and the teenage girl got their voices and their wits back after a while because Matt got out of range. Deaton managed to get the little girl back on her feet again too, but it isn’t easy repairing that kind of ruin. He couldn’t fix the permanent brain damage it caused.”

Derek feels cold at the thought alone, and he almost hates making Stiles go on.

“What about the guy?” he asks carefully, changing gears and then reaching over to cover one of Stiles’ hands with his own.

“Deaton fried his ass,” Stiles says, “metaphorically, of course. With him, it’s all about balance, you know. He turned Matt’s own hex on him for the sake of cosmic stability, completely wiped him out with just the snap of his fucking fingers, right there behind the chemistry building.” He shudders visibly. Derek squeezes his hand a little tighter.

“I mean, yeah, sometimes, some people need a good kick in the head. I get that it was about balance, but seeing it happen with that special kind of calm Deaton always has, that was seriously the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen. Matt’s eyes went completely blank and then he kinda just dropped and started drooling. In a permanent way.” He squeezes Derek’s hand briefly, before Derek takes it back to take a turn down the street where the club is located.

“Deaton took me in early because I started showing signs that I’d inherited my mom’s spark after she died. He said it was part of my grieving process. My instinctual reaction to pour out the emotions I had sort of brought the magic pouring out with them. He somehow _knew_ that would happen. He knows a _lot_ of things, okay? The way he turned Matt’s fucked up spell on him and cleaned out his upstairs-brain took a lot of power, and Deaton has that power in amounts that _none_ of us can really begin to understand. So... so I need you to tell me that you understand how dangerous he is, or we’re not going in.” Stiles finishes just as they pull up on the curb by the anonymous entrance to Ambrosia. Derek turns off the car and unbuckles his seatbelt, turning to face the man he is gradually growing more and more fond of, and concerned for, as the minutes tick by. There’s a quiet desperation in Stiles’ stern gaze that is incredibly sobering. Then Derek nods.

“I understand.”

He has an impulse to try and lean in and kiss the worry off of Stiles’ face, but then Stiles smiles tightly and turns to get out of the car. He’ll have to do it later, Derek decides, if he gets the chance.

The giant doorman isn’t hovering at the bottom of the stairs like he was the last time Derek was there, but the velvet rope is still stretched in front of the entrance. As it turns out, Stiles knows how to pick locks (“High school bet, don’t ask,” he says when Derek quirks an inquiring eyebrow at him), and when the door swings closed behind them, Derek is already fighting a bout of unease.

The club looks different without the many patrons occupying the space and the furniture, the coloured, dim lighting replaced by normal, white halogens. They light up the immediate route between the entrance and Deaton’s office, which only proves that he has to be in there. Judging from the look Stiles exchanges with Derek, he’s come to that conclusion too. They don’t make it more than a few, cautious feet in, before the office door is opening, Deaton emerging from the bright room, casting a square of pale yellow on the dance floor only broken by the shape of his shadow.

“Derek, Stiles? What brings you here unannounced? Have you found her?” Deaton seems genuinely surprised to see them, apparently not trying for a clichéd villain entrance, but simply there because, what, he was about to leave? His only worry seems to be for Cora, and Derek is beginning to think that maybe they've got it all wrong. Stiles snorts, clearly not of the same mindset.

“Oh, she’s fine. Might be scarred for life, but she’ll live. No thanks to you,” he snaps, jutting his chin out defiantly. Derek can almost feel how the anxiousness is building in Stiles as his slender fingers drum a nervous, hurried beat against the side of his thigh, making the harsh light of the room catch in the silver rings on his fingers. The situation feels like it’s slipping before they’ve even gotten any information, and Derek wonders if he should have made Stiles wait in the car. It’s too late for that now. Besides, he realises, Stiles would never have agreed to that. He decides the only way forward is to be calm and sensible and hope that his composure will rub off on Stiles.

“We found her, yeah. Gerard Argent had her,” he replies, and notes how Deaton doesn’t seem surprised by this. Stiles bristles, clearly having caught on to it as well. Derek suppresses a frown. Chris Argent still does work for Deaton. He could’ve told the vet about his father, just like he told them, Derek reasons, because this is Deaton, a trusted ally of the Hale pack. A man that, despite the total lack of contact in the years since the fire, he desperately wants to trust.

“She’s unharmed. Well, she’s healed is probably a better way to put it, but she’s back with Laura,” Derek answers, determined to handle this, as Stiles is clearly geared for a confrontation Derek really hopes won’t happen. He watches as Deaton walks behind the bar and pours himself a drink before he answers.

“I see. I’m glad she's okay. And Gerard? His accomplices?" He studies the amber liquid as he sloshes it around in the glass.

Derek senses Stiles’ anger flare and puts a calming hand on his arm, covering the black markings for a moment. He just needs to keep the situation under control, to stay calm. Stay calm. Just stay calm. Who’s he kidding? He has no idea where this is heading, has no control, and his calm is quickly slipping as he senses Stiles fighting to hide his anger.

“Gerard is dead. So are his men. It seems he tried to work a spell to his advantage, but it took them all out instead,” Derek replies, forcing himself to stop side-eyeing Stiles, and start focusing on the possible threat in front of them. Because Deaton _is_ a threat, he realises. The man is too calm, his answers too short, and Derek finally starts feeling his nerves turning into something closer to hard-boiled anger.

“Well, then you are here, because..?” Deaton draws out the last word as he looks at them both, setting the glass on the bar without having tasted a single drop. It’s a simple motion, entirely ordinary, and yet Derek feels as though he should take it as a clear warning. He desperately doesn’t want the confrontation to have to become violent. Beside him, Stiles is staying quiet, and this oddly reminds him of their encounter with Jimmy, except now it’s Stiles who’s the real muscle here. The magical muscle, so to speak.

“We found something interesting at Gerard’s hide-out,” Derek says, and goes on when Deaton cants his head as if to say ‘go on’. “A hoodoo altar. Stiles said it was a weird mix of different kinds of magic, that very few people could have hidden the dodgy replacement ingredients while still making it work on the surface. You know anybody who could have done that?” Derek feels like they’re playing a game of who says it first, who addresses the elephant in the room; the accusations.

“Not in this part of the country, no,” Deaton replies, stepping out from behind the bar.

“Can we cut the crap?” Stiles asks, suddenly, and Derek glances back at him. Might as well get the actual business on the table. “Are you denying your involvement in this or not?” Crossing his arms over his chest, he looks at Deaton imploringly, and Derek finds himself mimicking his stance.

The fact that Deaton doesn’t reply, just looks at them in his weird, passive way, is enough of an answer for Derek. Deaton is still calm as a rock, and while Derek does feel on edge, Stiles is coiled so tightly by now that Derek is getting seriously worried.

“I don’t like being used to topple pieces on your board,” Stiles hisses angrily. His feelings of betrayal are getting the best of him, and Derek understands, he really, really does, and he feels it himself, but losing focus will only hurt them both.

“You always were quite good at chess, Stiles,” Deaton replies. His ongoing calm only seems to anger Stiles more.

“Out of academic curiosity, which positions would you think to place yourself and Derek in on the board?” he goes on, and Stiles scoffs loudly.

“Do I look like I fucking care, when you’re cheating your way two moves ahead every turn?” he asks, stepping closer to Deaton. Deaton doesn’t move; Derek does, though, keeps himself close to the fuming bundle of anxious nerves beside him.

“I suppose not,” Deaton says, looking thoughtfully between the two of them. 

“What I do seem to notice is that these events have brought the two of you rather close together, hasn’t it?” Deaton asks, and Derek, feeling unexpectedly cornered, finally decides to step in. He interrupts Stiles and what was probably going to be a snappy remark, stepping just that much more forward and placing his hand on the front Stiles’ tense shoulder.

“You gave Gerard a defective spell. Why?” he asks. Deaton smiles sympathetically at him and holds both palms out.

“I didn’t give him anything. He came to me for help and I told him the same thing I told you; I am neutral. And just like I gave you Stiles’ name, I told Argent that if he wanted someone to weave that kind of spell work for him, he would have to get it through someone else.”

“So you outsourced your destructive magic?” Stiles yells incredulously, pushing forward. “That’s really respectable of you, Alan, I’m near tears with admiration!” Derek pushes back on Stiles’ shoulder a little firmer, but the aborted, angry jerk of his body is only momentary, purposefully not moving him forward.

“I can’t play favourites,” Deaton replies tightly, his voice showing varying emotion for the first time since they arrived. His body language hasn’t changed yet; Derek is waiting for that with the anticipation of someone about to witness a large dog inevitably snap.

“And you know just as well as I do that if Gerard wasn’t stopped, he would be toying with the laws of nature. Imagine if he’d gone to you second. He would’ve gotten a clear no, we both know this. So he’d have gone to Jimmy next and found that he was incapable of producing that kind of magic on his own. Argent would’ve then moved on to someone else out of state. We both know how hunters like him think; he would never have let the idea go. What do you think would have happened then?” Deaton asks, his stance still firm. Stiles glares at him from Derek’s side.

“He would have gotten the correct spell,” he grinds out, visibly outraged at having to aid Deaton’s point.

“He would have gotten the correct spell.” Deaton confirms. “Making sure that Jimmy got his hands on what Gerard would need to fail his insane quest, is the only reason there isn’t a war raging on the outskirts of Beacon Hills as we speak. Do you realise how powerful it would have been, had it not been faulty? The consequences of it would have been enormous, it would have permanently jumbled the energy lines that keep this whole town standing, which is on a fine line as it is – a human being trying to forcibly cheat death when he is so close to it is against the laws of the balance—“

“So you gave him a two-way gun and made him point it at my sister?” Derek interrupts with a snarl, quickly growing fed-up with Deaton’s need to justify himself. Balance or no fucking balance, he had trusted the man. Another tally in the column that speaks for Derek never making people-related judgements.

“I didn’t tell him to do anything to your sister. Why do you think I sent you to Stiles when I realised that Gerard had taken her?” Deaton retorts heatedly, his cool exterior cracking. Derek growls, low in his chest, fingertips itching towards the shift.

“Don’t give me that cryptic bullshit, he needed a werewolf for the spell you gave him to work, and you _knew_ he would take a Hale! You know the truth, the whole story, and that makes you _just_ as responsible for what happened as Gerard or Jimmy is. You name the players and make the connections, and there’s not a damn ounce more dignity in that than if you played the game yourself. You owe me the truth—you owe the memory of my _mom_ the truth, you _fucking_ coward!”

A sudden blink of bright light floods the dance floor, and then four large light bulbs on either side of them explode simultaneously in a shower of glass, Derek and Stiles dodging towards each other to avoid the shards.

“Watch yourself, Derek. You could get hurt,” Deaton warns him, eerily calm, and Derek has a brief second to register Stiles wrenching himself out of his grip, before the first wave of shocking heat rolling out from the centre of Stiles’ body knocks him backwards. In the blur of movement, Derek registers Deaton stumbling as well, naturally more braced for the impact of a magical assault than he is, the defensive expulsion of adrenaline-spiked anger only knocking him backwards.

“Stiles!” Derek yells, scrambling to his feet, lunging for him and missing as Stiles moves forward again. He’s on edge and thrown right into defence-mode by Deaton’s sudden outburst and, Derek recognises with horror, him threatening Derek. The thought that someone would lash out on his behalf almost threatens to overwhelm him, but instead, he focuses on loosening his shoulders as he shifts, his beta eyes easily finding focus points around him.

Deaton is warding off the spikes of heat coiling outwards from Stiles’ body with what looks like a surprising amount of effort. Derek would have assumed that for Deaton, it would be like swatting flies, but even from his position a good fifteen feet away, he can sense the difference in Stiles’ posture, in the way his fire swipes at Deaton. The assault is uncontrolled and furious in a total contrast to the charge he took of himself when they had fought off Jimmy and his people.

Derek sees a gap between lashes at the same time Deaton does, and he doesn’t have time to react when Deaton brings up his hands and swipes them through the air. Stiles’ feet goes out from under him as his whole body jerks and sends him flying into the side of the bar counter, head-first, with a wood-splintering crunch. Derek is moving then, feet propelling him forward, touching the ground once, twice, heaving himself forward through the heavy panic at seeing Stiles’ slumped, still body against the bar. There’s nothing in his head but a need to help, in whatever way, and to get control of the situation.

Right before he manages to claw into Deaton, all resolve to keep the man safe because of their history gone, Deaton makes an evasive manoeuvre to the left, brings himself upright again, and touches the palm of his hand to the thickened brow of Derek’s forehead. It’s not forceful, or painful, more like a gentle tap, but something between Derek’s eyes, deep inside the confines of his skull, seems to suddenly constrict. With a roar, Derek drops to his knees, clutching his head.

The pain seems to roll in like a tidal wave of tight, electrical current, coursing out the lengths of his arms and legs until he curls in on himself in a cramped, painfully taut ball. His teeth are ripping at his lips, and he can just make out Stiles’ heartbeat off to his side, suddenly ticking up, but he has trouble focusing on anything but how he can’t see a thing; the flash of agony is subsiding, but he’s still blinking furiously against the light in his vision. His hands and feet are grabbling blindly against the floor with the grace of a newborn pup, heavy-limbed and off balance. Ever so slowly, he manages to get his feet under him, and as the spots subside from his sight, Stiles is standing again. Derek feels a surge of relief that immediately gets replaced by weirdly numb horror.

Stiles is bleeding from a large gash along his ear, from a headwound at his hairline, and from several jagged scratches and scrapes on the sides of his neck and jaw, splinters from the broken bar counter in his hair and on his clothes. He has shrugged his outer shirt layers off. What’s making Derek’s throat seize up though, is not only the look of pure, unadulterated fury that warps his face, but the pointy, uneven chunk of wooden panelling he’s pressing into his lower arm – the other one already gushing red down his bony wrist. The three of them form a perfect triangle, Derek teetering still unevenly at his point with Deaton and Stiles on either opposite side of him. Deaton looks graver than Derek has ever seen him, equal parts anger and frustration on his face, but his head is lowered like that of a bull, his eyes intense under the weight of his brow; his entire focus is on Stiles.

When Stiles drops the splintered piece of wood, the cuts left behind aren’t so much cuts as they’re open wounds, rough at the edges like the tear of a blunt-teethed bite. Derek is almost a hundred percent sure that Stiles isn’t supposed to be bleeding from both arms for his magic to work. Deaton, very tellingly, is starting to look worried, and he’s hiding it badly. The air around Stiles is beginning to waver, like over hot asphalt in late July.

“Mr. Stilinski,” Deaton warns, voice loud and clear over the crackling starting to permeate the immediate area around Stiles’ form. Even from the distance, Derek can tell that his eyes are all pupil, solid black and expanding rapidly, swallowing the blood-shot sclera. Weren’t they white the last time Derek saw his eyes change? Stiles’ shoulders are heaving with deep, open-mouthed breaths as he raises his hands in front of him, palms presented, the blood that’s dripping down his arms lifting off his skin and sinuously starting to curl around his arms like thin, rotating bracelets.

“Stiles, you need to calm down!” Deaton exclaims, louder this time, his own hands coming up in front of him, clearly prepared, albeit reluctantly, to defend himself. It dawns on Derek that for all that they’re on total opposite sides at this time, Deaton was still Stiles’ teacher, and he most likely still _cares._ Stiles doesn’t reply, doesn’t even flinch. There is something different about him, something wrong, something that – unlike when he had performed the location spell in the shop – draws the light in until he seems darker than before, his eyes glowing like hot coals. The room feels warmer.

Stepping forward is more like tipping forward for Derek, the world still uneven under him. He needs to get to Stiles, though. Something is off, the way he holds himself is off, but Derek doesn’t get more than a few paces before he slams into something he can’t see, and is knocked back. Bewildered and once again thrown off balance, his upper arm split open right through his sleeve, Derek’s eyes flit to the floorboards in front of his feet.

When the hell Stiles threw a mountain ash circle around him, Derek can’t for the life of him figure out. Maybe he was on the floor longer than he had initially thought – Stiles must have acted quickly in order to protect him after getting to his own feet, but Derek can’t find it in him to feel bad that he isn’t exactly grateful; at the moment, he really, _really_  needs to not be trapped just that out of range.

“You’re going to kill all of us—damn it!  _Stiles_!” Deaton shouts. Stiles, somehow, seems to be powering up, the room steadily growing darker, warmer and his coal eyes hotter. But his pulse is rock-steady, and Derek can’t figure out if Stiles is in total control, or if he’s lost it completely. His presence seems to be vibrating louder and louder, like a ticking time-bomb.

“You need to stay in control, do you hear me?” Deaton cries over the hollowing noise pushing in at Derek’s ears like the low thrum of a bass. Is the room getting smaller? It feels like it, as if they’re no longer in the vast space of the club, like the walls are shrinking to the size of Derek’s living room as the shadows creep closer and closer. “I taught you to rein in your emotions when practising so you don’t end up like your mom, you have to _use_ those methods!”

With a hoarse scream, Stiles lunges out, a whip-lick of fire rolling towards Deaton who just manages to miss it. Behind him, a chair liquifies in such an abrupt splatter of melted plastic that it makes Derek yelp against his will. He tries leaning through the circle, but it’s no use. He can just stand and watch as Stiles finally shows some indication that he’s aware of his surroundings, his shoulders hunching up towards his ears. The veins in his throat are burning under the skin, stark red and pulsing, and the rings on his fingers are turning into globs of liquid silver mixing with the blood. 

“Don’t talk about my mom, it wasn’t my fault! _You have no right_!” he bellows, the sound bouncing off the floor. For a moment, the black of his eyes recedes, like he’s faltering, and Derek grabs onto the opening with teeth and claws.

“He didn’t say it was your fault, Stiles!” he calls, straining his voice over Stiles’ wheezing, laboured breathing. “You’re burning out of control, okay, I can’t talk about magic for shit, but this is going to fucking cook you!” Derek doesn’t know what happened to Stiles’ mom, and he doesn’t know a thing about how Stiles’ anger must have tipped him over the edge of whatever knife’s edge of balance he was standing on, but Stiles is turning pale, and the way his pulse is sky-rocketing is pumping out the blood fuelling his fire even faster. His magic is running wild, and the spell is riding _him_ now, embers at his fingertips threatening to burn them to the bones.

When Stiles turns his head towards Derek, it’s like everything in him, heartbeat and all, seems to come to a complete and utter stand-still.

His eyes are glass-bright, wide open, his irises blazing, and while he’s crying very openly, the salty drops never make it further than just below his lower lashes before they evaporate, sizzling against his white-hot skin. He looks so lost and so terrified that it takes all Derek has not to risk losing a limb trying to cross the barrier. Stiles’ mouth opens and closes a few times, and Derek thinks he might have gotten through, but then Stiles _howls_ with agony, his eyes glazing over with black again as he curls down to his knees and into himself. The thin silver hook in his earlobe is slowly warping, the metal writhing away off the crystal like a snake, and the soot-stained stone drops onto the floor with a clunk.

“What’s happening to him?” Derek screams at Deaton, who is standing in bewilderment, staring at the thing he caused, the body on the floor of his bar turning into a living volcano. He doesn’t reply. Derek fights an urge to tear his hair out or bite his own leg off, pacing his small circle back and forth with short, quick steps like a stressed zoo animal.

“Break the circle!” he shouts, suddenly realising that it doesn’t need to be Stiles who does that. When Deaton turns to face him, it’s like he only just remembered that too.

“ _Break the fucking circle, Deaton_!” Derek roars. For a second, there’s a flash of the old Deaton in the man’s eyes, compassionate and protective, and then he steps forward and breaks the circle without even touching it. Derek crosses the line and stands still for a whole of two seconds before he knows that Deaton can go fucking screw himself if he likes; there’s no time to incapacitate the vet, he needs to get to Stiles.

The first touch to the back of Stiles’ neck, exposed in his curled up position, burns like touching a hot-plate. Derek hisses, yanking back his hand. The collar of Stiles’ shirt is charred and ripped, and the chain around his neck must have snapped, because it’s gone. The heat this close is almost chokingly forceful, but Derek pulls away his claws, and his fangs, grits his now human teeth and reaches into the protective ball made by Stiles’ body. The stench of blood climbing towards a boiling point is sickening, and then Derek manages to fit his hand around Stiles’ wrist and unfold him with a hard pull. Stiles resurfaces with a sob, his body cramping when Derek forces their fingers to link together, both his hands holding tightly onto Stiles’. It’s almost like a panic attack; Derek tried that, once, just after the fire, remembers fear in its purest, most irrational form as it took his breath from him. Derek can feel the skin over his cheekbones growing tight and painful, like a brutal sunburn, can feel blisters on his hands where they grasp Stiles’.

“Derek—“ Stiles croaks, and Derek is there immediately, pushing their foreheads together even though Stiles is vibrating and convulsing so hard that he keeps being dislodged.

“I can’t stop it, I can’t—fuck, _help me_ ,” Stiles weeps, his breath hot like boiling steam against Derek’s lips. His healing is fighting to keep up, replacing slowly crumbling skin over and over, and it’s exhausting, but Derek keeps holding on, shakes his head and Stiles’ along with it. He’s going to look like uncle Peter did, after the fire, when this is done, and he doesn’t care.

“I can’t do that, okay, I can’t do that, you have to pull yourself back, but I’m right here, and I’m not going anywhere, I promise,” he rambles. He can smell the melting plastic on the tips of Stiles’ shoelaces. Another burst of crackling heat envelops him when Stiles chokes out a painful-sounding sob.

“No— _fuck_ , it hurts, it just hurts, I can’t tamp it down, I can’t!”

“It’s okay, Stiles, it’s just a matter of holding on, you don’t have to do anything but listen to me, so just please hold on!” Derek begs, manhandling Stiles’ contracting body into his arms while keeping the grip on his hands, frantically trying to figure out how the hell he’s going to make any kind of difference, how he is going to make Stiles come down from his peak of panic enough for the kid to reel himself in, doesn’t know what he could tell him that would even fucking _matter_ —

Not until he suddenly does.

“I have a lockbox in my apartment,” Derek tells him, voice shaking, burned lips cracking and healing over again. “Where I keep this ridiculous thing that I never showed to anyone, because I didn’t think I’d ever find someone I trusted enough to share it with. But now I’ve met you, and you’re _insane_ and you’re fucking wonderful. And— and I want you to see it, okay, but you can’t do that if you fry yourself alive. So can you just _please_ , at least for the sake of your goddamn curiosity, hold on and fight your way back from this?” At least the heat disperses any evidence that he might be crying, although he’s not entirely sure if it’s that or just sweat rolling off his face. Maybe both. Folded into his chest, Stiles takes a deep, rattling breath, and then another one. Derek presses his mouth into Stiles’ damp hair and rocks him like a child, while Stiles breathes and clutches at his hands like they’re the only tether keeping him from shooting into space like a rocket.

And after a few long, agonizing moments, his heart rate begins to slow down. Very gradually, the fire under his skin starts dying out, bringing the crackling of the air along with it, and when Derek checks, his head still pressed close to Stiles’, the veins in his neck are fading back to pale blue. There’s still blood everywhere (some of it burned black against the floor, and that is just fucking disgusting), and when Stiles’ bones finally stops vibrating, he starts shivering. The temperature of his body seems to make a sudden drop from burning to cold, but his hold on Derek is still strong, and he’s conscious even if he is literally burned out. Derek finds himself muttering nonsense into Stiles’ hair while he comes down, body relaxing against Derek’s chest, until there’s the sound of a throat being cleared above them.

“Can I…” Deaton starts. Derek looks up, baring his teeth in immediate response and shielding Stiles’ body from view, just in case. But Deaton just crouches down, places a small first aid kit on the floor in front of him, and shows his palms in a gesture of surrender.

“Let me help,” he says, very gently, and Derek feels raw with it, feels vulnerable and emotional and ready to snap if he has to take any more.

“Please,” Deaton adds. Derek considers him for a beat, but he doesn’t smell like charged magic anymore, and his heartbeat doesn’t lie, so he carefully curls his shoulders away from Stiles’ head so Deaton can get to his arms. He starts with the left one, elevating it to keep the bleeding to a minimum.

“You need to understand this position of mine, Derek,” Deaton says, pulling bandages and thick, fluffy cotton pads from the kit.

“If I had taken care of Gerard myself, I wouldn’t be neutral anymore. The moment you take a life, you’re sullied. It’s like virgin blood; when it’s first been used for, say, a ritual, it’s no longer pure. I wouldn’t be able to retain my status as a neutral force and keep the energies of the region in balance.” Setting down the now bloody tufts of cotton, Deaton swipes an antiseptic over the first cut. When Derek’s grip loosens, making a move to reach out and hold the arm still, Stiles makes a very small whimpering noise. It could be because the antiseptic stings, or it could be because he’s afraid to lose control again, but either way, Derek squeezes his hand, and Stiles presses his face a little firmer into his breastbone, eyes closing. While Derek keeps his grip tight, Stiles doesn’t even flinch as Deaton makes the first stitch, the needle and threat seemingly appearing out of nowhere. Derek doesn’t linger on it; his focus seems cluttered and overly occupied as it is, nearing a sort of limit he didn’t know he had, as his body heals and he listens to Deaton’s low voice.

Deaton finishes bandaging Stiles’ arm and then swaps it for the one Derek is holding, his fingers swift and competent. Maybe it isn’t much different than patching up a cat, Derek thinks.

“I have a responsibility as a guardian of the Balance, Derek,” Deaton goes on, breaking the silence once more, unperturbed by the fact that Derek hasn’t said a word back.

“I took this on for the greater good. It’s a choice I made. But that doesn’t mean I’m entirely happy with it coming before family, or friends, or what I want or don’t want to do. It is still the reality of it, though. If I can’t maintain this position, if I had to step down, a lot of people and other beings would have to suffer for it. I inherited the right to choose from my grandfather, and taking it means life-long commitment – and it won’t always be easy, not for me, and not for the people I happen to feel close to as a product of my old life. I’m not a person, anymore, Derek, I’m a guardian. I _have_ to be neutral to stay one. I’m just doing my best to name the players so people will survive,” he finishes as he puts the final touches to the bandage on Stiles’ other arm, which Stiles immediately retracts to curl alongside his other one into Derek’s chest.

“I understand,” Derek says as he stands, lifting Stiles up under the backs of his knees and his broad back despite the annoyed grunt and the slight flapping of long legs it earns him.

“That doesn’t mean I like it, and it doesn’t mean I’m going to forgive you for this.” Hiking Stiles up a little more securely, feeling long arms coming around his neck and Stiles’ heavy head roll in against the crook of his neck, Derek spares one last, pitying look at Deaton and his sad fucking life choices before he heads for the entrance.

“I’m _sorry_ , Derek,” Deaton calls after him. Derek doesn’t reply.

It’s ridiculous, carrying a grown man bridal-style up the basement stairs and across the pavement to his car, and Derek has to glare at a few people giving him weird looks, sending them cowering onwards on their walks, but he doesn’t care. Stiles has his eyes open again by the time Derek has him propped up in the front seat of the car, looking tiredly out the window. The weather has cleared up, sun shining for the first time in days. Determined to not waste his time building up to things anymore, and keeping the promise he made to himself earlier, Derek leans in and kisses Stiles, just briefly, before closing the door and walking around to the driver’s side.

“So are you gonna tell me what’s in the lockbox?” Stiles asks, as they pull away from the nightclub, leaning against the door and looking at Derek with barely open eyes. Derek smiles slightly.

“Maybe,” he replies. Stiles snorts and rearranges himself in his seat to look out the window again.

“Asshole,” he mutters, but he’s smiling.

He keeps smiling all the way back to San Francisco, even when he eventually dozes off.

 

\---

 

Stiles somehow manages to convince Derek that he doesn’t need another tumbler of the bitter-smelling herb mixture Derek had helped him make last time he carved himself open like a Christmas ham. Instead, he lets Derek get them both more or less undressed and under the covers of Stiles’ bed in record time for someone who’s supposed to be suffering from blood loss. He’d insisted that his spark would clean up the worst of his injuries in sleep, if for nothing else, then at _least_ to apologise for being a power-hungry dick (which, what the hell, how does that make any sense?  What a freak. Derek is crazy about him) but Derek had still pressed his palm to the back of Stiles’ neck and sucked clean, dark lines of ache out of him while he had fumbled off his shoes.

Derek lies on his side in Stiles’ bed, the mattress a lot softer than he’s used to, and watches Stiles prod and pull at his bandages for a while before finally lying down, facing Derek and linking their fingers together between them.  

“Don’t read too much into it,” Stiles warns him cockily, wiggling his fingers between the spaces of Derek’s knuckles. He’s still tired and uneasy, Derek can tell, and he’s playing it off with bravado, so he just arches an unimpressed eyebrow. Stiles’ mouth twitches at the corner, and then he scoots closer.

“Just… don’t leave right now.”

Derek hums and twists down the bed until he can push his head under Stiles’ chin, eyes drooping until they close to the sound of the steady, calm heartbeat against his mouth.

He wakes up what seems to be just a few hours later, his nose pushed into Stiles’ cheek with a long arm slung over his chest. Pulling back reveals Stiles very much awake, bathed in afternoon sunlight and smiling the weird, little smile that Derek, he realises with a fuzzy, heady feeling, might be kind of falling in love with.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys! This marks the end of our story, and I'd like to thank all of you for reading and dropping kudos and your lovely comments on our little project. Hopefully, we'll get around to write some more for this verse, because in all honesty, I'm personally a little addicted to the potential of it. 
> 
> A little message from my partner in crime!  
> "Hey guys, Gea here. I want to say thank you for hanging on with us for this. It's been quite the journey, for both Cecil and I. We've never tried this sort of detective genre together before, but it was fun! I have a lot of feels for our three leading men here, and I remember agreeing with Cecil that we HAD to show Scott's character the respect he deserves, the respect Scott and Stiles' friendship deserve. I hope we managed. There's a lot of things we hint at that hasn't been truly revealed in this round, and Derek and Stiles' relationship has only JUST started so I think it's fair to say that both Cecil and I want to return to this verse. Trust me, I'll start pestering him as soon as I come up with the next plot line for our little group in Ye Olde Magic Shop.  
> Thank you, again, and may you have a fantastic New Year!"
> 
> You can find both [me](http://hayesgeneration.tumblr.com/) and [girleverafter](http://girleverafter.tumblr.com) on tumblr for generally ridiculous things and Teen Wolf related antics. Happy New Year, people.


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